Making Britain: Visions of Home and Abroad (1870-1950)

This project will examine the formative South Asian contributions to Britain's literary, cultural and political life,1870-1950. As some historians have demonstrated, Britain has had a migrant Asian population for over 350 years, from the early trading encounters through the Raj period. For these imperial citizens Britain was both 'home' and 'contact zone'. Through extensive new archival research, we seek to uncover the rich cultural output of this 'nascent diasporic community' and advance understanding of Britain's own cultural 'hybridity'; fulfilling, at the same time, an urgent need to heighten public awareness of the depth of the Asian contribution to contemporary 'national' life. ('South Asia' here includes the present day India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka/regions of the British Raj and their diasporas.) A common misconception still persists that the contemporary South Asian population arrived only after 1950 due to the so-called fall-out from Empire.Though more visible in terms of influence and scale, South Asians were in fact interacting with and challenging the monofocal gaze of canonical imperial culture well before this time. Whilst the exchanges between for example Bengali Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore and Anglo-Irish WB Yeats are well-known, there has been little analysis of the degree to which Tagore's cosmopolitan vision anticipated the development of, and resistance to, transnational modernities in Britain. Similarly, other Asian writers and intellectuals resident in Britain in the early 20th century like activist Mulk Raj Anand or Tambimuttu (Editor Poetry London 1939-52) are often overlooked in discussions of the cultural narratives of the modernist movement despite Anand's close links with Bloomsbury, and Tambimuttu's creation of a platform through Poetry London for a host of figures including MacNeice, Durrell, Kathleen Raine, Lorca and Neruda. The magazine also featured illustrations by visual artists Henry Moore, Graham Sutherland and Fahr-el-Nissa Zeid. In this same period the well-documented works of Gandhi, Nehru and Jinnah figure prominently; less known but influential nonetheless was St Pancras councillor, Krishna Menon who founded Pelican books, Penguin's non-fiction imprint. Earlier examples include the journalistic/literary activities of the sisters Cornelia and Alice Sorabji and the travel writings of B.M.Malabari, Shah Mahamed, J.P.Pillai and Toru Dutt, all of whom commented influentially on English life. There are the letters, diaries and photographic representations of others, often themselves the object of British surveillance: working-class ayahs, lascars, soldiers who 'crossed the black waters' to fight in both world wars, who together constituted a remarkably varied 'community in the making'.Whether privileged, often western-educated intellectuals, or people who left a different social legacy,all made a to-date inadequately understood impact on the evolution of Britain's mixed cultural heritage.

Although in recent decades terms such as 'diaspora' and 'migrant' have become current to describe the cultural activities of Britain's Asian population, we intend to read such concepts backwards in time, interrogating their valency within earlier periods of Britain's multiracial history. More specifically, we wish to unravel the embedded, intertextual networks that existed between the often forgotten narratives of this generation (literary, historical, autobiographical), and the British cultural establishment, comparing the various modes by which they mapped bicultural visions of home and abroad, and laid the ground for the construction of new multiple identities within Britain. Through conferences, seminars, books, a website and a database of resource materials, this collaborative inter-disciplinary project will have broad application, working in partnership with the British Library (Asia, Pacificand Africa Collections) and the South Asian Diaspora Literature and Arts Archive (SALIDAA)