| Summary: | The focus of the article is the way in which Gandhi in South Africa between 1893 and 1914 constructed a notion of India through a process of partly imaginary circulation between South Africa and India. While he embarked upon a career, firstly as spokesman, and then as leader of the very diverse Indian population of South Africa, he tried to remain in touch with political developments in India. His attempt at ‘inhabiting two spaces at the same time’, while necessarily utopian in character, nevertheless offers a fascinating case study in ‘long distance nationalism’, and the way it was intertwined with forms of cosmopolitanism. There is no indication however of an inclination on the part of Gandhi to think in terms of a wider space that would extend to contemporary South Asia.
|
|---|