SOCIAL DYNAMICS 33.2 (2007): 61–85 Re-imagining South Africa via a Passage to India: M.K. Jeffreys’s Archive of the Indian Ocean World 1 Meg Samuelson Abstract Archivist, essayist and poet, M.K. Jeffreys produced an evocative archive on the Cape’s location and functioning within the Indian Ocean world. This article traces the passages by way of which this archive was produced and explores the implications of this archive for our present. It shows how Jeffreys’s epistolary relationship with the first Indian Agent to South Africa, Srinivasa Sastri, led to re-conceptualisations of her subjectivity as a white South African, and to the reclaiming of her previously denied South Asian ancestry. Exploring the circuitous, transoceanic route via which her new conceptions of South African identities and histories emerged, it concludes by engaging with Jeffreys’s inscriptions of Cape slavery, Islam and creolisation. ‘Durban’, declares Imraan Coovadia’s narrator in The Wedding, ‘created the nation-state of India’ (2001: 143); his is a self-consciously hyperbolic statement, yet not an utterly unfounded one: on both sides of the Indian Ocean, studies of the Indian nationalist movement have emphasised the ways in which M.K. Gandhi’s political apprenticeship in South Africa informed the Indian National Congress’s (INC’s) ability to imagine a unified, independent India. 2 I wish to turn the tables, and consider the ways in which ‘India’ has shaped imaginings of South Africa. Rather than explore, for instance, the influence of Gandhian Satyagraha on anti-apartheid resistance campaigns, I focus on a minor character in the drama of re-imagining nationhood in South Africa, yet one who made certain critical interventions. This focal figure is Marie Kathleen Jeffreys (1883-1968), an archivist, essayist and poet whose life writings have languished in the Cape Town Archives Repository since their deposit nearly four decades ago. 3 Social Dynamics Dec 2007.indd 61 11/29/07 7:01:07 PM