Surendra Bhana's and Neelima Shukla-Bhatt's "A Fire that Blazed in the Ocean" is an historic testimonial to the hopes for social justice and racial equality that fired a generation of Indians transplanted to South Africa during the high noon of British imperialism.  Expressed in poems written in Gujarati, Hindustani, and English, and shaped by Gandhi's concept of satyagraha, this collection reveals the centrality of political interventions in the arena of culture as much as the actual painstaking mobilization of people against the concrete injustices they faced in a context of colonialism and (looming) apartheid.  This collection raises many important questions about the role of poetry (and more generally art) in the imagining of an alternative to the present --an arena that has apparently been abandoned in our age of the sound byte and the twenty-four hour news cycle.  An indispensable resource for students of the Indian diaspora, South African history, and more generally the politics of race and class.  

Vasant Kaiwar, MA (Oxon) Ph.D. (UCLA), Founder-editor, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East (1981-2002). Department of History, Duke University