Introduction

The Indian sub-continent has fed the western literary imagination since ancient times. It was usually seen in one of three ways – exotic (Andrew Marvell, in his most famous poem: ‘Thou by the Indian Ganges’ side/Shouldst rubies find’) or primitive (Othello’s ‘of one whose hand,/Like the base Indian, threw a pearl away’) or innocent. It was not until the start of the nineteenth-century that a new view of India took root with translations made available of the Upanishads and other ancient semi-scriptural texts. As the century proceeded British readers had the opportunity first to read the foundation writings of the sub-continent’s culture and then to hear for the first time the voice of contemporary India through the lyrical poems of the briefly fashionable Toru Dutt.

In any history of Indo-Anglian writing Bankim Chander Chatterjee’s Rajmohan’s Wife (1864) is taken as the starting point, but diasporically we cannot refer to any writing from the sub-continent before the twentieth-century. Even then it is stretching a point to include Rabindranath Tagore (who sometimes wrote in English, though usually in Bengali), Sarojini Naidu, Jogendra Singh or Romesh Chunder Dutt. Like the great political leaders Gandhi and Nehru, authors of autobiographies, these people inter-connected with Britain, and some of them visited it, but they never lived here for a substantial period.

The 1930s and 1940s

In the 1930s Mulk Raj Anand was based in London or in Buckinghamshire. Married to Kathleen van Gelder, he looked set to remain in England, fêted by literary society. He returned to India in 1948 as much because of his marriage ending as because of the lure of the newly independent India. The works for which he is still best-known were written in England: Untouchable , Coolie , the ‘Lalu’ trilogy of The Village , Across the Black Waters and The Sword and the Sickle . This is not reflected either in the subject matter or the setting of these novels. The major exception is Across the Black Waters , with its depiction of the slaughter of sepoys in the Flemish trenches of the Great War. This story, still less well known than it deserves to be, was partly provoked by Anand’s encounter with pacifist thinking in the London of the mid 1930s.

This image portrays Mulk Raj Anand with fellow writer Attia Hosain, in Lucknow. Mulk Raj Anand, who now lives in India, is a great admirer of the works of the late Attia Hosain and encouraged her to pursue her writing when she was young. He also wrote a profile of the writer, published in the 1979 edition of her novel Sunlight on a Broken Column , where he remembers the first time they met.

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Mulk Raj Anand and Attia Hosain, 1940 ca

Anand was for two decades so immersed in the society of London’s literati , working alongside Virginia and Leonard Woolf at the Hogarth Press and alongside George Orwell at the BBC, that he was virtually adopted by it. Only after his return to India did he begin The Seven Ages of Man , a bildungsroman sequence, large sections of which recall his years in Britain. In 1953 he published what is arguably his masterpiece Private Life of an Indian Prince , a key part of which takes place in London. Apart from a short book of reminiscences, Conversations in Bloomsbury , this was to be his last new work published in the United Kingdom.

Among those who worked with Anand at the BBC was Tambimuttu. Elegant and usually impoverished, Tambimuttu arrived in London in the 1930s from Colombo. He was an editor, critic and conversationalist of wit and brilliance, remembered now as much for being a catalyst to other people’s talent as for anything he wrote himself.

It became customary in the 1990s to talk of the ‘grand old men’ of Indian literature, many of whom had emerged in the 1930s and ‘40s and who were still actively engaged in new literary undertakings well into their eighties and nineties. Several of these knew Britain well. G.V. Desani’s influential novel All About H. Hatterr came out in 1948 and was enthusiastically received for its linguistic experimentation and almost surrealistic imagination. In his famous metaphysical fiction The Serpent and the Rope Raja Rao evoked the England of Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation in 1953. Neither of these writers, however, integrated as fully with Britain as Anand had done at the outset of his career or as Nirad C. Chaudhuri was to do at the end of his.

The works of Nirad Chaudhuri which we know best were written in English, but in the final decades of his life he increasingly returned to his mother tongue Bengali. In 1951 he aptly entitled his first book The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian . This remains to this day one of the best autobiographies ever written and also a key work in understanding the impact of the Raj on ordinary lives. He followed it with A Passage to England , a commissioned book of reflections based on his first sojourn here in 1955. In 1972 Chaudhuri came to live permanently in Oxford, writing several more books, including a second volume of autobiography. He died in 1999 at the age of 101, fêted now by a sub-continent he had so often offended and by an England he continued to castigate on account of what he saw as its remorseless decline.

The successor generation in the 1950s and 1960s

The writers thus mentioned would all have regarded themselves as Indian. They used Indian material and were profoundly affected by Partition. Younger sub-continent writers based in Britain did not assume the mantles of these literary elder statesmen. They regarded themselves as part of the new multi-cultural Britain that emerged in the 1960s, though of course its roots were ancient. Two prose writers, Balraj Khanna and Prafulla Mohanti, are also front-ranking visual artists, regularly exhibiting in inner city galleries and accepting public commissions as part of the new Britain. Mohanti’s Through Brown Eyes is an autobiographical account of what it is like to live among a suspicious white majority.

The superb novelist Kamala Markandaya, author of Nectar in a Sieve and The Golden Honeycomb , settled in Britain, but like Anand found it increasingly difficult to find outlets for her writing in this country. Markandya straddles the divide between the two generations, almost always writing about India but doing so with a detachment perhaps bred of distance. Attia Hosain, slightly older than any of these, is remembered for only one novel, Sunlight on a Broken Column , but it has a slow-burning reputation that is likely in the end to ensure it the status of a minor classic.

This photograph of Attia Hosain (middle) and two friends was taken at the time of Hosain's graduation. Attia Hosain attended the University of Lucknow and graduated in 1933 at the age of 20. She was the first woman in her family to graduate from university. Hosain was born in 1913 in Lucknow into a prominent feudal or taluqdari family and was brought up in the language traditions of old Persian, Arabic and Urdu.

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Attia Hosain (middle) - graduation photograph, ca 1933