Faith, freedom, friendship: cross-cultural affective networks in the correspondence of C F Andrews, E J Thompson, and V H Elwin, India and Europe, 1919 to 1964

The period from the Amritsar Massacre on 13 April 1919 to the funeral of Jawaharlal Nehru on 28 May 1964 was definitive not only for the establishment of the nation of independent India but also for the global diffusion of the teachings of Mohandas Gandhi and more generally for continuing affective relationships between Indians and Europeans. Charles Freer Andrews, Edward John Thompson, and Verrier Holman Elwin, all three of them (like the author of this thesis) white Anglo-Saxon Protestant males, were led by their religious faith to go to India as Christian missionaries. Their experiences in India caused all three to abandon their affiliations with their churches and to dedicate themselves to the cause of Indian freedom.
Their correspondence charts first their moves from organised religion to still highly motivated activism, then their contributions to the debate on the end of empire, and then their various friendships, developing independently of agreement or otherwise on religious and political concerns. Contacts with Gandhi, his disciples, and his teaching recur. The building of these friendships is tested against the postulates of Jacques Derrida’s Politics of Friendship and against E. M. Forster’s subversive views of friendship’s scope.
The starting point is an incident of violence which occurred in the Punjab under martial law following the Amritsar massacre. The emotional meeting between Andrews and the victim of this violence is examined in versions provided by Elwin, by Andrews’s accompanying disciple Gurdial Mallik, and by Andrews himself. Other accounts of the incident are provided by the perpetrator’s oral examination by the Hunter Committee, and by the perpetrator’s privately printed memoir. Andrews’s subsequent demand for full independence for India in his Independence: The Immediate Need is followed by Thompson’s role, at Andrews’s instigation and supported by Thompson’s American wife Theodosia, as a drafter and a signatory of a letter from missionaries to the British Indian press, condemning the one-sided support by the British in India for General Dyer, who had been responsible for the Amritsar massacre. Thompson’s return to England is followed by the publication, with the support of Forster and of Leonard Woolf, of his revisionist account of the 1857 rebellion, The Other Side of the Medal.
The thesis then turns to a multi-node trans-cultural correspondence between two founder members of an unconventional Italian female religious community (the Eremo Francescano, still in existence today), Andrews, Gandhi, and Elwin. Their letters, complicated but also sometimes illuminated, by the need for translations, show how Elwin’s regard for Gandhi’s teaching on poverty led him to found his own religious community, the Ashram of St Francis, among the tribal peoples of Central India, and then, as his interest shifted to anthropology, to leave his church and withdraw from his close friendship with the Eremo.
Drawing on the writings of Gandhi’s host in London, Muriel Lester, and of his secretary Mahadev Desai, the thesis argues that attendance at the second Round Table Conference, although the pretext, was only a part of Gandhi’s wider aims in his 1931 visit to Europe, which were to meet with those who might share his philosophy of life, and to demonstrate that philosophy in his contacts with the people of Europe. The dimensions in terms of space and time are considered for his travels and for those of his interlocutors (for him, always ‘friends’), and emphasis is placed on his meetings in France, Switzerland, and Italy, especially on his stay with Romain Rolland in Villeneuve, and his short meeting with Sorella Maria in Rome, with particular attention to what these meetings meant for his companions. These last two meetings strengthened friendships which endured.
On his return to India Gandhi was imprisoned. Recognizing prison’s spatial and temporal implications and its role as a trope in the anticolonial discourse, the thesis examines what this and subsequent imprisonments meant for these friendships, for the prisoners, and for their friends. Gandhi’s correspondence around his ‘fast to the death’ is examined in terms of his different relationships with individual friends. The thesis then moves to Nehru’s imprisonments, especially his last imprisonment during the second world war. By this time, he had established a close friendship with Thompson. The two were not allowed to correspond directly but by using different subterfuges Thompson was able to remain in contact and so to relieve the black thoughts that Nehru feared.
Taking Derrida’s postulate of the already composed funeral eulogy as a test of primary friendship, the thesis concludes with a discussion of the deaths of several of the protagonists together with the reactions of their surviving friends. Andrews’s death is followed by the death in war of Edward and Theodosia Thompson’s elder son Frank, and then by the death of Edward himself. The letters and prison diary entries Nehru wrote after and before these deaths asserted the values of memory and friendship. The thesis continues with Elwin’s friendship with Nehru, and with Elwin’s death, before concluding with Nehru’s death and funeral in 1964.
This thesis’ contributions are therefore to emphasize the historical importance of correspondence as a source for the examination of affective relationships and to demonstrate how the friendships described within it, postcolonial by virtue of their anticipation of the end of empire, existed without religious, racial, or political constraint, and serve as models for cross-cultural friendships in the postcolonial world.

Advisor: Khan, Y