Membership

Membership, broadly defined, constitutes belonging to a particular group and being privy to the particular advantages and disadvantages entailed by such belonging. Thus, membership is a foundational or fundamental quality. Membership consists of a whole spectrum of belonging, from the family (two persons at its lowest denominator), to a small group, a community, an institution, to different levels of society. A person can be a member of more than one sector of society. Groups can belong to different and overlapping parts of society.

Membership is likewise relational and temporal in nature, being articulated by the peculiar relationships that a group has with other groups in a given time period. These relationships are also never static and can be disrupted at any time. Consequently, membership is inevitably in a state of flux, and is subject to whatever conditions dominate those relationships. Defining these relationships is never easy precisely because they are temporal. However, these relationships and the conditions that influence them are important because they provide frameworks for understanding how identity labels and categories are formed. When a person is a member of a group, or indeed excluded from a group, this could be voluntary or involuntary. Therefore, self-identification or indeed identification outside the individual or group is also problematic. For instance, an individual or group may still consider themselves members of a category even if the state does not recognise that relationship. Similarly, state identification or recognition may not reflect how an individual or group perceives their own membership. A sense of belonging can operate at multiple levels, of which the nation-state is but one locus. Migration disrupts the classic nation-state model and also creates a disjunction between informal and formal membership, where formal membership denotes citizenship.Footnote ⁴

The way in which groups are formed also influences membership. A group may be forged through its access to specific resources such as land, hence the term ‘landowning class’. And yet other criteria, such as legislation, might limit access. Consequently, this unequal access confers differential and often hierarchical levels of membership, which are then reflected in the way status develops. For this reason, membership could be described as a precarious resource. At any given moment, membership could confer benefits or advantages; at another, the same membership classification may become a hindrance or disadvantage, thereby weakening or completely removing its value as a resource. As previously discussed, membership is a fluid concept, the parameters defining a given group could alter when, for instance, laws or political conditions change.

The Indian Question, Historiography and Settler Colonialism

In the context of South Africa, the picture was made more complex by the country's shifting status within the study's time-frame of 1860 to 1960. This time period contributes to historical scholarship on immigration, which explores the creation of the idea of national origin as a racial category, a form of identification, and ultimately a platform for exclusion.Footnote ⁵ This work examines the laws and events that were particularly salient in the framing of foreign relations between India, Britain and South Africa over this timeframe, and therefore is critical to defining the status of Indian South African membership. It is impossible to chronicle every event that influenced the status of Indian South Africans, and this article does not attempt to do so. However, the one hundred years from 1860 to 1960 were chosen in order to illustrate the evolution of political, economic and social ideas around the status of Indian South Africans. While a law could change the status of this group overnight, the social and political implications were bound up with the history of the group prior to the passing of new laws. The logic of the ‘longue durée’ is that one cannot truly evaluate the impact of a law without reference to the passage of time preceding it.

Another important aspect of this historiography is the question of who this study is about. The issue of Indians in South Africa has been treated from a variety of perspectives in existing scholarly literature: as an Indian migrant or diasporic question, as a South African domestic issue, as a British imperial matter. A later wave of scholars in the 1970s and 1980s began to broaden the significance of the subject, perceiving it as transcending national histories. Robert Huttenback, for instance, approached the subject in 1971 by examining the issue through the familiar topics of Gandhi and British imperialism.Footnote ⁶ Bridglal Pachai, himself the first South African Indian historian, broke fresh territory with his thesis-turned-book in the same year, which focussed on the South African Indian question as an international issue.Footnote ⁷ More particularly, Pachai was keen to examine how far South African Indian politics left their impression on international affairs. Hugh Tinker's work of 1976 took up the issue of Indian migrants across many different territories within the British Empire. While labelling them ‘Indians overseas’ he broke away from a straightforward Indian narrative and made the following comment about his work: “This is just as much a study of the British in their imperial role as it is of Indians”.Footnote ⁸

Research has now moved beyond Africa, its former plantation colonies and British imperialism, to knit together the migratory histories of South Asians in North America.Footnote ⁹ Although there is a growing trend towards viewing history as transnational rather than national, the multi-sited nature of transnational histories has posed particular linguistic, logistical and financial difficulties for scholars, as articulated particularly well by Neilesh Bose.Footnote ¹⁰ Rather than looking at Indians as the focal point or in relation to white settlers, there has also been a move to provide more comparative analyses of Indians alongside native Africans. Scholars such as John Soske have cut their teeth on flashpoint events in history like the Durban Riots to provide important expositions of relations between Indians and native Africans.Footnote ¹¹ Bose too has commented that the study of ‘Asiatics’ in South Africa should necessarily encompass the position of Chinese migrants; after all, lumped into this category, the Chinese were also subject to the same forms of discrimination.Footnote ¹²

The position taken in this article is that the history of Indian South Africans is as much a history of Britain and South Africa and other members of South Africa as it is that of Indians. It is also a history that equally belongs to the purview of international history, both in terms of underscoring Britain's relationship with the white Dominions and its impact on India, the evolution of the United Nations (given its tabling at successive General Assemblies from 1946), and international perceptions of race, as well as revealing the political dynamics between India, Britain, South Africa and the wider political sphere through UN political bloc voting and responses to sanctions.

During the historical period within this study, Indian South Africans traversed several categories of membership as South Africa was subject to an intense period of political ferment first as a British colony, then as a semi-autonomous dominion in 1910 when South Africa engaged in its own bid for autonomy and sovereignty vis-à-vis the British Empire, and later as fully autonomous dominion from 1931. Against this backdrop, India as a British colony struggled to obtain Dominion status and later independence, finally dealing with the upheaval caused by new borders and the aftermath of Partition. Britain too endeavoured to stave off the dissolution of Empire, whilst redefining its relationship with the erstwhile Dominions as well as India, and finally seeking to define the Commonwealth.

One way to draw some of the boundaries of Indian South African membership would be to look at the commonly referred to so-called ‘Indian Question’. At this juncture, it is necessary to explain who Indian South Africans are, and this definition includes those who migrated from India to South Africa, as well as successive generations born in South Africa. Different aspects of the story of Indian South Africans have been enumerated in the history of indentured labour and so-called ‘repatriation’ schemes. There have also been extensive works written about the India-born, and London-trained barrister, Gandhi's South African years and struggles in connection with the discrimination experienced by Indians. Gandhi, who also helped to found the Natal Indian Congress in 1894, raised the Indian struggle in South Africa to much greater prominence, and, as is well-known, developed ideas and practices relating to non-violent civil disobedience while working there.Footnote ¹³

This backdrop has led to the evolution of a particular kind of historiography surrounding Indian South Africans and indeed Indians elsewhere in Africa, commonly termed as ‘the Indian Question, which has largely revolved around the issue of rights and entitlement as settlers.Footnote ¹⁴ In deconstructing the term it becomes clear that the label was heavily loaded with the attitudes and political nationalisms of membership within colonial South Africa and the British Empire. Just like the so-called ‘Jewish Question’ in Western Europe, within the context of South Africa the term demonstrates that Indians were regarded with a persistent singularity. According to the Indian account of the 1947 UN General Assembly debate on the issue, “The Polish Delegate compared the treatment of Indians in South Africa with the treatment to which the Poles themselves had been subjected by the Nazis”.Footnote ¹⁵ Yet the Indian Question as a concept should be viewed as a reaction to Indian settlement as well as a complex gradual evolution that was a response to a variety of political, economic, social and legislative issues that were both domestic and international. UN diplomatic debates also highlight the ramifications of the issue for other former white settler colonies of the British Empire, as discussed later in this article.Footnote ¹⁶

At the heart of the Indian Question lay the white settlers’ antagonistic reaction to the possibility of perceiving Indian migrants as co-settlers.Footnote ¹⁷ Du Bois points out that white settler attitudes towards Indian migrants were by no means uniform across Natal, particularly as these settlers did not form one particular occupational class. Even colonial attitudes were neither uniform nor sudden.Footnote ¹⁸ The original stream of Indian migration from 1860 consisted of impoverished Indians, labelled as ‘Coolies’ who emigrated to South Africa from the latter half of the 19^th nineteenth century to serve as indentured labourers. This migrant workforce was recruited by the British as substitute labour following the abolition of slavery. Since India was a British colony, it could provide a steady source of so-called ‘coolie’ labour to work on British sugar plantations overseas. This class of Indians was largely destitute, seeking a way out of their poverty-stricken conditions, with limited other options available. Conditions aboard transport ships and on plantations were dismal, leading several historians to conclude that indentured labourers endured a new form of slavery.Footnote ¹⁹ The context of this stream of migration contributed much to conditioning white settler perceptions of desirable and undesirable migrants, and the perception of race along economic lines.

Initially, Indian indentured labourers were provided with incentives to emigrate, ranging from payment of passage on the ship to ownership of a plot of Crown land once the five-year term of servitude had ended. However, as the time expired indentured workers steadily increased in number and began to settle down, the European white settler community perceived them as a threat to their own economic and property interests. White settler agitation for more stringent immigration laws was not the first order of priority for British colonial administrators who favoured the steady labour supply, but they came under pressure to appease European white settlers, who were increasingly looking for more autonomy from the British metropole. By 1891 colonial administrators had removed the incentive of Crown land ownership.Footnote ²⁰ A few years later, they revoked all parliamentary franchise for Indians, and by 1895 had introduced amendments to the same immigration law, imposing a £3 annual tax on all ex-indentured labourers who failed to reindenture or return to India once their indenture was completed. This policy shift was then followed by a series of curfews and other discriminatory policies towards Indians.

The perceived ‘menace’ of Indians was compounded by successive migration of more affluent, entrepreneurial Indians from the 1870s who were attracted to economic possibilities in South Africa. These Indians possessed much more social capital as well as links with mercantile networks in India. Their higher economic standing was signified by the ability to pay for their own ship passage to South Africa, earning them the ubiquitous title of ‘passenger Indians’ to distinguish them from their poverty-stricken Indian brethren who had entered indentured servitude.

These class distinctions were significant for raising the political consciousness of the poorer Indians and provided greater agency to Indians as a whole. While the indentured class may initially have possessed limited aspirations, passenger Indians held ambitions that were similar to those of European white settlers. Consequently, their economic activities and capacity to buy property, in hitherto white areas of settlement, placed them in direct competition with white settlers.Footnote ²¹ Initially, British colonial administrators distinguished between Indian labourers and upper classes of Indians, and this also created friction with European white settlers.

Whilst it is true that antagonistic colonial and white settler attitudes towards Indian migrants gathered apace as Indian migrants grew in numbers and dispersed across Natal, this does not provide the full picture. Colonial perceptions of ‘native’ African labour were an integral part of the shaping of attitudes towards Indians. An often overlooked aspect of settler colonialism, conceptions of ‘natives’ fed into the dynamics between Indian migrants, native Africans and white settlers. Native Africans were considered more intractable, less willing to become labourers and endure the poor working conditions on the plantations given their own reserves of land. Theophilus Shepstone, the Secretary for Native Affairs between 1853 and 1875, who was also responsible for segregated land tenure systems between native Africans and white settlers,Footnote ²² is believed to have been instrumental in politically repressing native Africans.Footnote ²³

Long before the high noon of imperial legal restrictions against Indians from 1885–1914, white settler negative attitudes towards native Africans created a framework for growing resentment towards Indians. In an 1859 British government immigration board authorised guide to the colony of Natal, native South Africans were characterised as primitive, lazy, dishonest and dirty: “…then, first and foremost must be placed the Kafir's laziness. This is found to be the greatest stumbling-block at the outset of every attempt to civilise the race”.Footnote ²⁴ These kinds of attitudes towards native Africans also stemmed from a larger plan to create a ‘white’ civilisation in Natal. Colonial officials and British missionaries felt it was their moral duty to civilise native Africans. Consequently, a debate ensued about whether to grant Africans the electoral franchise, particularly those who were ‘colonial born’.Footnote ²⁵ The importation of Indian and Chinese labour was purely a matter of expedience. Nevertheless, the incentives provided as part of the indentured labour scheme were eventually perceived as a nuisance by colonial officials. When the majority of time-expired indentured labourers elected to stay on but to leave the plantation sector, colonial officials had no choice but to employ fresh indentured labourers.Footnote ²⁶ However, the growing presence of Indians was perceived by European settlers as driving a stake through the plan to create a white colony.

In 1910, when the Union of South Africa was forged as a semi-autonomous dominion of the British Empire through fusing together the colonies of Natal, Cape and the Orange River, colonial administrators faced an even trickier task of negotiating around the various political tensions. Although Britain still had an imperial vision of South Africa, and continued to exert a great deal of influence, the aftermath of the Anglo-Boer war made nation-building against the backdrop of British and Afrikaner demands precarious. Within this context of building a white nation, keeping the relative sizes of the black and Indian populations down, was pushed to even further prominence. The 1913 Immigrants Regulation Act (Act 22) was born out of this backdrop. Rather than being blotted out by an imperial federal design, discriminatory attitudes of the pre-Union colonies were exercised with even more force.Footnote ²⁷

The British may have had a vision of exporting Britishness to all the corners of the globe making up their Empire, but in reality, colonial administrators constantly had to negotiate between what was ‘British’ and the distinct cultures that either already existed in these colonial spaces, or sprang up in response to British colonialism.Footnote ²⁸ These new imperial worlds were spaces in which there was both a dynamic relationship with the colonial metropole and an organic relationship with other colonies within the Empire. South Africa and other white settler colonies such as Australia and New Zealand were located much more at the peripheral spaces of the Empire in their early years, unlike India.

Known colloquially as ‘The Jewel in the Crown’, India was Britain's prize colony because of resources such as the spice trade, tea, cotton and jute, and its location as a strategic hub in maritime and overland trade routes. The British East India Company, which was later annexed by the British Crown, fought several strategic wars against other European companies in order to take control of trade in India. As one of Britain's most important colonies, and with its elevated position in the imperial imagination (as exemplified by Paul Scott's 1966 novel Jewel in the Crown), India's role in the British economy placed it at the very least, at the semi-periphery, if not as a secondary core to the Empire.

Nevertheless, there was a key difference between the status of Indians as colonial subjects ruled by the British, and white settler colonists. This distinction later translated into the forging of dominion status for the white settler colonies, whereas India entered a protracted struggle, spanning decades, to achieve the same. The speeches of Srinivasa Sastri, who served as India's first Agent to South Africa in the late 1920s,Footnote ²⁹ underlined India's political disadvantages within the Empire particularly with respect to the Dominions.Footnote ³⁰ Sastri's later writings also evince a progression in the way that dominion status needed to be perceived in relation to Empire, and it is clear that he advocated treading a much more independent path from the Empire.Footnote ³¹

A further difference needs to be drawn between settler colonies and colonised states and this lies in the relationship with the colonial metropole. Veracini outlines this divergence as follows: “settler colonialism constitutes a circumstance where the colonising effort is exercised from within the bounds of settler colonising political entity, colonialism is driven by an expanding metropole that remains permanently distinct from it”.Footnote ³² This kind of difference is well illustrated by the relationship between the colonial metropole and South Africa—a settler colony—versus India—the jewel that significantly contributed to an expanding British colonial metropole.

Much postcolonial literature deals with the encounter between colonial rulers and indigenous subjects, but this proves inadequate in framing the question of settlers across Empire. We can straightforwardly think of former British Dominions such as Australia, Canada, New Zealand and South Africa as white settler communities which had ‘traditional’ models of colonial engagement with their respective indigenous populations. As mentioned above, what is less clear, is the relationship between white settlers and other settler subjects of Empire (such as Indians), or indeed other settler subjects of Empire and native populations.

Very early on, British officials designated Indians as Asiatics, along with Chinese labourers. This designation merely provided further reinforcement of colour lines that weakened the status of Indians as British subjects. In other words, being a British subject was a membership resource that became increasingly fractured as the priorities of the different colonies within the British Empire changed. At the same time, Cape of Good Hope House of Assembly debates in the 1890s reveal that colonial officials initially felt they could not legitimately discriminate against Asiatics if they were ‘British subjects’.Footnote ³³ Even when discriminatory legislation began to kick in several years later, Indian migrants continued to make appeals for equality and sought redress for grievances on the basis of being British subjects.Footnote ³⁴

Membership and citizenship, together with authenticity and legitimacy, were all conceptualised in relation to entitlements and the making of colour lines. Consequently, membership acquired the quality of a resource that could both empower as well as reduce agency and power. It could also give rise to new categories of membership that could create new forms of agency, but also sharpen perceptions of race and membership.

The Development of Indian Political Consciousness

Another factor that influenced the status of Indian South Africans was the rising political consciousness amongst Indians spearheaded by ‘Mahatma’ Mohandas K. Gandhi during his early years working as a lawyer in South Africa. Against the backdrop of emerging colour lines, Gandhi enacted a series of protests first as a subject of the Empire, and this agency is reflected in the early incarnations of the newspaper Indian Opinion that he established in 1903. Indian Opinion had several notable effects. The most obvious effect was to create a public forum for the collective grievances, shared experiences, expectations and aspirations of Indian South Africans. In the beginning it developed a stronger sense of identity, not merely as South African Indians, but through membership as colonial subjects within the British Empire. Within a few years of its establishment, the tone of the paper changed from an emphasis as imperial subjects to one that emphasised their identity as South African Indians.

Indian Opinion chronicled evidence of growing agency through passive resistance, and the development of a new sense of Indian membership that was anti-colonial in spirit. While Gandhi himself left South Africa in 1914, thereby ceasing to write for Indian Opinion, the evolution of Indian Opinion in the years between 1903 to 1914 is notable in signalling the evolution of Gandhi as a person, and his vision for the Indian nationalist movement in the Indian sub-continent.

The printing press was also significant in drawing attention to South African Indians’ standing at a literary level. Despite the expense of needing to employ multiple typefaces, and engage translators,Footnote ³⁵ the newspaper was to be published in three Indian languages: Hindi, Gujarati, and Tamil, as well as English, to better penetrate and obtain the support of affluent and key members of the wider South African Indian community. Gandhi would have been aware that this vehicle for expression carried the hallmarks of ‘white entitlement’, and that within the political and social landscape, there were “print laborists”, namely those men “who attempted to define printing as part of white racial privilege”.Footnote ³⁶ This perhaps also explains why printing in the vernacular was strategically as well as practically important. However, maintaining the publication in three languages proved too challenging, and by 1906, the Tamil and Hindi sections were discontinued. In successive years, the number of Gujarati pages disproportionately increased relative to the pages produced in English. Since the bulk of the Gujarati community were ‘Passenger Indians’ from the mercantile class, this Gujarati bias has been interpreted by some commentators as having disenfranchised many other Indians, including those who could read English.Footnote ³⁷

Nevertheless, despite its humble beginnings, and its meagre official subscription base,Footnote ³⁸ Indian Opinion was significant for its longevity, operating for 58 years, from 1903 to 1961. Two other Indian newspapers, which had preceded Indian Opinion, proved to be very short-lived ventures.: Indian World died out in 1898, the very year it was established, and the Tamil-English weekly Colonial Indian News lasted just a few years, closing in 1903.

Numerous clippings of Indian Opinion articles were attached to various official dispatches and discussions within the archives in South Africa. These indicate that despite its low circulation rate, the newspaper was seen by colonial administrators as an aperture for burgeoning collective consciousness and group identity amongst Indian South Africans. It is perhaps for this reason that criticisms levelled against the government of South Africa were noted, and articles circulated amongst various government departments.

Indians Overseas, the Notion of Diaspora

From the late 1800s, in response to reported ill-treatment of migrant indentured labourers, the Government of India began to grapple with the idea of how to handle Indians who had emigrated. India perceived a collective consciousness amongst Indian migrants within the African continent as a whole, as well as within other plantation colonies such as Mauritius and Fiji. Anti-Indian legislation born in South Africa sent ripples across Africa as other colonial administrators elsewhere in the continent considered South Africa as an influential model by which to create their own legislation. Unsurprisingly, therefore, the reports regularly issued by the Agent-General of the Government of India to South Africa often had references to events affecting Indians in other parts of Africa. By 1929, government departments called ‘Indians Overseas’ were established in both British India and the colonial metropole. These departments started issuing censuses of Indian population figures outside India, not just in Africa but in other British colonies, territories and dominions, together with reports on the conditions of immigration and problems experienced by Indians in these various locations. The conditions governing these dispersions were not the same, nor was the legislation governing these settlements by any means uniform, thus the information compiled was used to compare the approach of policymakers across territories. This kind of information throws up thorny issues like whether all Indian migrants can be understood as diasporas, or indeed considered part of a bigger diaspora. In scholarly literature this distinction is also rather murky. For instance, Dufoix suggests that where Indian settlement constituted a majority, other identities such as religion have assumed greater prominence than an Indian identity. On the other hand, post-colonial emigrants with minority status have given ‘Indian’ membership more prominence.Footnote ³⁹

The issue of membership within these territories was complex, generating challenges for the colonial and post-independence Indian government in its handling of discrimination that Indian migrants experienced elsewhere. In the case of South Africa, intervention by the Indian government on behalf of Indian South Africans created its own share of pitfalls when South Africa was shifting away from Empire, and crafting its own citizenship laws encompassing anti-Indian immigration legislation. As the next section will highlight, in the late 1940s, at the same time that the Union of South Africa was intent on passing a bill that culminated in the Citizenship Act of 1949, the newly-independent India attempted to understand the position of Indian South Africans in relation to both India's own citizenship laws and the impending legislation. India's interventions were dialectal. Without India's intervention, there would have been far less pressure brought to bear to redress Indian discrimination. On the other hand, India's championing of the rights of Indian settlers in the colonies provided a loophole for the Union of South Africa to argue that Indians could not legitimately be seen as ‘South African’. Consequently, in this context, the use of the term ‘diaspora’ only captures one kind of membership that is rather fixed in character, which is often politically loaded. It tends not to engage the gaze of the host country, the originating country, and the migrant themself in entirety.

The term ‘diaspora’ is often conceptually linked to territory and immigration laws. While membership can be more fluid cutting across boundaries, diaspora tends to articulate a sense of territoriality. Immigration legislation has often mapped this territoriality in very marked ways, producing in conjunction with citizenship the formal category of alien, and restrictions based on origin and ethnicity. Indian South African membership, however, was not limited by this racial and spatial mapping; it could encompass belonging to India, Empire and South Africa. Some of the pragmatic tensions between membership, citizenship and space are well illustrated through this distinction.

Citizenship and Diplomatic Negotiations

The shaping of laws that impacted on Indian South Africans was not merely determined by domestic concerns, but was greatly influenced by the British Indian and later post-independence Indian government's diplomatic interventions in South Africa, along with South Africa and India's respective relationships with Britain. Gandhi's early involvement in South Africa was also pivotal in India's sustained engagement with the Indian South African issue. This persistent engagement, pursued with particular political vigour by Jawaharlal Nehru, resulted in multiple diplomatic and political interventions on behalf of Indian South Africans, which were significant in shaping membership precariously both as a resource and medium of exclusion for Indian South Africans. For this reason, the status of Indian South Africans could be seen as a prism for the voices and key perspectives of the governments in India, South Africa and Britain during their respective colonial periods, and soon after achieving independence.

The complexity of race in the colonial context also influenced wider diplomatic negotiations as evidenced, for example, by India's position within the Imperial War Cabinet meetings of 1917 and 1919, the 1927 Cape Town Agreement, and later UN General Assembly debates. Significant in specific ways, the Cape Town Agreement ultimately signified an attempt by the Union government to reduce the Indian population through negotiating a voluntary assisted repatriation scheme with India. For the Indian government (Sastri was an important member of the Cape Town delegation), the agreement heralded a potential cornerstone for the upliftment of Indians, particularly housing conditions and education. Sastri was appointed India's first Agent to the Union in part because of his role in the Cape Town proceedings, with the hope that he would assist with the implementation of the Cape Town accord. By 1929, however, the repatriation scheme was seen as an unmitigated failure, particularly since a significant number of Indians were born in South Africa. Of those who returned to India, many faced further impoverishment, experiencing difficulties in finding comparable employment and wages. Rising criticism levelled against the Cape Town Agreement by various South African Indian political bodies, followed by the introduction of the Transvaal Asiatic Land Tenure Bill in May 1930, brought about the second Cape Town Conference in 1932. During this conference, Dr Malan, its chair and leader of the Union delegation, proposed the possibility of Indians colonising other regions of the world, and from this the Colonisation Enquiry Committee was set up. Eventually, the scheme ended in failure and split opinion within the South African Indian political body. The group that splintered from the Indian South African Congress, named itself the Colonial Born and Indian Settlers Association. Its members felt that the Indian government had betrayed them by agreeing to the committee in the first place. For the colonisation scheme, it was the beginning of the end, and the Indian Colonisation Enquiry Committee findings were practically ignored.

The two Cape Town Agreements were also seen as a means by which the issue could be resolved within the aegis of developing Commonwealth relations. As Pachai points out, India's standing within the British Empire had improved following India's war effort in the First World War.Footnote ⁴⁰ Sastri, in particular, had hopes for a change of status with respect to India, Britain and the Dominions within Imperial relations, though this failed to materialise. At the first ever session of the UN General Assembly, India—though not a member of the General Committee—was invited to participate in the discussion, and tabled the issue of the treatment of Indians in the Union. General Smuts, the then South African Prime Minister, tried to remove the matter from the agenda arguing that it belonged to the realm of domestic jurisdiction, but was unsuccessful.Footnote ⁴¹

India's main issue, as a means of highlighting “discriminatory treatment of Asiatics and Indians in particular on the grounds of their race”, was the 1946 Asiatic Land Tenure and Indian Representation Act, which Smuts had introduced after the Pegging Act had expired. Like the Pegging Act, this legislation—otherwise known as the Ghetto Act—was designed to severely restrict Indian property ownership in White areas as well as to remove communal representation. It divided Natal into White zones, known as ‘controlled areas’, where Indians were no longer able to buy property, and ‘uncontrolled areas’ that were open to both Whites and Indians. India argued that the Act had violated the bilateral agreement forged at both the 1927 and 1932 Cape Town Roundtable Conferences, which laid out specific obligations for the uplift of Indians. It also pointed out that the inter-governmental bilateral nature of these agreements demonstrated that this was not a domestic issue. At this juncture, within the UN setting, the Indian South African issue moved beyond bilateral or even Commonwealth relations to become part of a larger dialogue regarding conceptions of racial equality and justice, particularly in the aftermath of the Second World War and the move towards decolonisation. It was a time when the UN, then in its infancy, was attempting to figure out the nature of its charter, and India was keen to leave a significant impression on this dialogue.Footnote ⁴²

From 1946, after India removed its High Commissioner to South Africa in protest against the discrimination to Indians, R.T. Chari, the secretary to the former Indian High Commissioner to South Africa, functioned in an unofficial capacity as Acting High Commissioner. Chari was the vehicle through which the dynamics in South Africa were not only reported, but scrutinised and interpreted. It is clear from his communications that he took pains to understand the complex nature of politics at play, which the Indian government heavily relied on, if not always in complete agreement with his insights and conclusions. Chari's communications provided a conduit for interpreting the Indian government's relationship with Indian South African political groups as well the Union government. When the 1949 South African Citizenship Act created confusion about how to properly interpret its ramifications for Indians, the Under-Secretary to the Government of India, B. N. Nanda wrote to Chari on 17 September 1949, seeking clarification on the matter.Footnote ⁴³ Nanda queried which of the two tiers of Indian South Africans—those born in South Africa and those born outside South Africa who acquired the status of South African Nationals—would be considered South African Nationals under the new Act. In further exchanges, Chari interpreted the law as defining four classes of South African citizenship:

1. a) By birth

2. b) By descent

3. c) By registration

4. d) By naturalisation

These four classes of South African citizenship could then be used to divide Indians into four categories that he described as “exhaustive and mutually exclusive”, namely Indians:

1. a) Born in the Union on or after 2.9.49

2. b) Born outside the Union on or after 2.9.49

3. c) Born in the Union before 2.9.49

4. d) Born outside the Union before 2.9.49.Footnote ⁴⁴

Chari provided a comprehensive interpretation of the law, but also asked Nanda to seek a legal opinion. When Nanda did so and revised the interpretation, a detailed exchange followed in which the two parties disagreed on specific points of interpretation. For the Indian government this interpretation was crucial in terms of providing accurate guidance for Indian South Africans, as well as for assessing how many Indians would not qualify for South African citizenship under the aegis of the new Act. It also faced a further quandary in terms of the position of Indian South Africans vis-à-vis Indian citizenship. On the one hand, the newly independent Indian government could not revoke Indian citizenship and thereby risk leaving Indians in the lurch. On the other hand, it knew that South African Indians would suffer major repercussions if they chose Indian citizenship over South African as this would further fuel the idea that these were not rightful South African citizens. In response to these issues, the South African press first reported that Indians were faced with a “Nationality Choice”,Footnote ⁴⁵ and later that Indians were advised by the Ministry of External Affairs to accept Indian nationality.Footnote ⁴⁶ The Indian government also inserted special provisions into the nationality and citizenship clauses of the Indian Constitution on behalf of overseas Indians, so that they could claim registration as citizens of India. However, this needed to be worded circumspectly in order to maintain the integrity of anyone claiming South African citizenship.Footnote ⁴⁷ Membership and citizenship were flagrantly at odds with each other within the increasingly draconian immigration legislation that South Africa was bent on creating in the 1940s and 50s. As evidenced by the later period of rigid exclusion and segregation, the legacy of this was to last well beyond the period of colonial rule in India and South Africa and to create hierarchical tiers of membership that were at the heart of the apartheid system.