An extraordinary epistolary exchange, criss-crossing the Indian Ocean in the late 1920s and early 1930s and animated by the circulation of literary texts forms the focus of this exploration into textual circuits and intimate relations in the late imperial world. My dramatis personae—Marie Kathleen Jeffreys, V. S. Srinivasa Sastri and P. Kodanda Rao—played remarkable roles in the theatres of empire, decolonisation and nation building during this charged era, while in the process briefly producing a community across the Indian Ocean. The prophetic comment made by Rao to Jeffreys in a letter of August 1930 dispatched from London, where he and Sastri were attending a round-table conference on Indian independence, invites the inquiry I undertake here; it shifts this epistolary exchange from the private domain to the public, authorising the trespass into the intimate and affective sphere that this study performs, and eliciting readings that approach the political via the personal.

Employed at the Archives in Cape Town, Jeffreys expended much of her life tracing the texture of her city in literary, sociological and historical accounts. I have argued elsewhere for the past and present significance of these writings that conceptualise the Cape as a creole crucible in an oceanic crossroads at the tip of Africa (see Distiller & Samuelson 2005; Samuelson 2007; 2011).