THE PAIN OF RACISM IN THE MAKING OF A ‘COOLIE DOCTOR’

Abstract

Histories of Afro-Asian solidarity rarely dwell on intimacy, yet they tend to presume an affective reciprocity between people of African and Asian descent that has come to define postcolonial politics in its characteristically utopian form. In fact, there is every indication that the terms of endearment between African and Indian communities were strained at best across the landscapes of the decolonized and decolonizing world – and that narratives of fraternity are not the whole story of interracial contact, intimate or otherwise. This essay focuses on the life story of K. G. Naidoo (1906–99), a Tamil doctor known as Dr Goonam who treated Indian, coloured and African patients and whose practice drew her into the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa. Her autobiography, Coolie Doctor, is an intimate history of racial knowledge that challenges easy readings of solidarity or conflict between Indians and Africans in and around twentieth-century Durban. Goonam's text allows us to appreciate the embodied experience of interracial hierarchy in the context of both progressive medicine and anti-racist politics of the kind that was unfolding in South Africa in the 1940s and after. I read Coolie Doctor as an embodied, materialist account of African–Indian relationships in the context of apartheid politics in KwaZulu-Natal – an account that, in turn, archives histories of racial encounter, collision and citation with ramifications for postcolonial histories of all kinds.

Keywords:

• Afro-Asian solidarity
• apartheid
• archiving sexuality and race
• embodiment
• politics of medicine
• South Asian diaspora

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to many people who have helped me craft this essay. Elleke Boehmer, Susheila Nasta, Rozina Visram and the audience of the opening conference of ‘Making Britain: South Asian Visions of Home and Abroad’ at SOAS in the spring of 2008 were my first interlocutors; thanks to them for the opportunity to think through the diaspora in such stimulating company (http://www.open.ac.uk/Arts/south-asians-making-britain/about.htm). I presented versions of that paper at the annual Conference on South Asian Studies at Madison, Wisconsin and by invitation of the South Asia Program at the University of Iowa. Thanks to Gerry Forbes, Barbara Ramusack, Paul Greenough, T. J. Tallie and Dana Rabin for offering engaged and thoughtful comments at different stages, and to Patricia Romero for generous access to her interview material on Dr Goonam. Thank to Nathan Chio for his transcription work. Julie Parle also gave me very helpful feedback, for which I am grateful. My colleagues in the University of Illinois’ History Workshop are the best and most trenchant readers; thanks especially to Terri Barnes, Jim Barrett, Jim Brennan, Clare Crowston, Diane Koenker, William Munro, Kathy Oberdeck, Rebecca Ginsburg and Mark Steinberg. To the staff at the Gandhi-Luthuli Documentation Centre, especially, Vinoo Reddy, and to the Bastian fund at the University of Illinois, I owe a tremendous debt. Jon Soske's work has been utterly illuminating and I appreciate the time he has taken to engage me in the basics and complexities of Durban-centred South African history. Rajeswari Sunder Rajan was instrumental in the review process, for which I am deeply appreciative. To William and Kathy and Fiona and Cara and Wendy I offer a huge and heartfelt thanks for introducing me and mine to Durban, and so much more. Any errors of fact or otherwise are my own.

Notes

¹For an example of recent work aiming at just these questions but focusing on figures like John Dube and Mohandas Gandhi, see Hughes (2007).

²According to Raman (2006: 199), ‘whites … feared their residential districts being swamped by unhygienic and money-grabbing Indians, and this fear was fuelled by the very real competition between Durban's racial populations in trade and in the workplace.’ See also Bhana (1997: 106, under ‘Notes’) and Sookdeo (1988).

³Goonam also remembered her father saying ‘we are similar folk [sic] but look at the trouble we are going through.’ See also Romero (1998: 193–204).

⁴Black doctors were extremely rare; only ‘a handful … before mid-century’ had qualified (Digby 2005: 428; Noble 2007).

⁵My heartfelt thanks to Dana Rabin for this reference.

⁶For a very different autobiographical account of this period, see Naidoo (2002).

⁷For polyculturalism, see also Prashad (2002).

⁸According to Flint's research, Indians went to native doctors on the recommendation of Africans living in their yards just as Kasturi recommended Goonam to Beauty (Flint 2006: 10). It's hard to generalize from the extant evidence about the constant versus episodic nature of this kind of ‘exchange’. I am grateful to Julie Parle for encouraging me to nuance these claims.

⁹For Xuma's hostility (fuelled in the first instance by Srinivasa Sastri (India's agent general in South Africa), see Sookdeo (1988: 72); for Mandela's autobiographical account of his conversion to Indian anti-apartheid politics in South Africa, see Mandela (1994: 103–4). See also Hughes (2007); Soske (2009).

¹⁰For examples of casual/conversational reference, see Naidoo (2002). Recall that Gandhi was ‘the coolie lawyer’, a term he applied to himself (Gandhi 1947).

¹¹Nor does this Tamil context necessarily dictate a static, essentialist mode of being; see Daniel (1984).

¹²Gandhi-Luthuli Documentation Centre (University of Durban-Westville), file B/G 1518/421.

¹³‘There was also great objection to Dr Goonam's western style of dressing and her outrageous habit of smoking in public when it was considered taboo for a woman to be seen with a cigarette’ (ibid.).

¹⁴For some indication of her ferocity on the question of Indian women and Congress membership, see ‘Dr Goonam and the Congress’, Indian Views, 27 May 1938: 8. Gandhi-Luthuli Documentation Centre, file B/G.

¹⁵For mention of her daughter, see Romero (1998: 195) and Chetty (n.d.).

¹⁶The phrase is Gaurav Desai's (2004: 130).

¹⁷Jaspreet Kindra, ‘Coolie Doctor Succumbs at 92’, The Leader, 25 September 1998 (Gandhi-Luthuli Documentation Centre, File B/G, 1801/4). This is in studied contrast to the issue of Gandhi's Indian Opinion which featured her photo on the eve of her departure for study in Britain alongside an article entitled ‘First South African Indian Lady Left for England to Study Medicine’. Indian Opinion 9(26), 9 March 1928 (Gandhi-Luthuli Documentation Centre, file B/G).

¹⁸The first edition was published in 1985 by Ravan Press.

¹⁹For an elaboration of this theme, see Burton (2003).

²⁰With the exception of Parle's book, people of South Asian descent, whether as practitioners or patients, figure comparatively minimally in these works, though ‘as objects of medical scrutiny, Indians feature prominently in the archival records’ (Parle 2007: 68).

²¹I am thinking here of Tejaswini Niranjana's arguments about ‘the Afrocentric basis of the claim to being West Indian’ (2006: 30); see also Munasinghe (2006).