India Arrived: Seeing and Being in Britain, 1870-1914 - an examination of the definitive phases and key moments of early Indian migration to Britain

The book project 'India Arrived: Seeing and Being in Britain, 1870-1914', will trace a themed and structured cultural and literary history of the first distinct phase of significant Indian migration to Britain, 1870-1914. To date, this early phase of South Asian diaspora has not been shaped into a phased monograph-length narrative, such as that proposed. The period is bracketed by the opening of the Suez Canal, and the relaxing of certain caste restrictions on Indians' travel at its one end, and by the outbreak of the First World War at its other, when, following the massive but controversial involvement of 1.5 million Indians in the War effort, Indian-British relations markedly changed in the direction of greater divisiveness and nationalist politicization. Building on and expanding the extensive, pathbreaking archival research carried out as part of the 2007-10 AHRC-funded 'Making Britain' project, not yet consolidated in monograph form, the book's narrative of the formation of Britain's first diasporic communities, and of the unfolding of the first India-British literary and cross-cultural collaborations, will be organized under five keynote headings capturing definitive aspects of the five decades in question, and rounding off with a coda and conclusion: Gateway Suez; London Under Indian Eyes; Oriental Fin de Siecle; Edwardian Extremists; 1912; Coda: The Indian Salient.The monograph will contend that the early 1870-1914 period was distinguished in particular by friendships and acts of hospitality operating in both directions between the cultures, on British soil, expressed as one-on-one exchanges between Indian and British individuals (Dadabhai Naoroji and his British hosts, Manmohan Ghose and Laurence Binyon, Sarojini Naidu and 1890s poets around Yeats, Margaret Noble and Ananda Coomaraswamy, Rothenstein and Tagore), and within groups such as the National Indian Association, the Theosophical Society, and the India Society which comprised both Indian and British members. It was also characterized by a frank and unabashed approach among the Indian travel writers, intellectuals, essayists and poets towards British culture and society, facilitated through new networks of trade and commerce, and religious and cultural interchange between India and Britain. From the British point of view, exchanges were animated also by a palpable, to date critically neglected British interest in India as providing new modes of knowledge, concepts of 'truth' and conventions of figuration at a time of intensive late Victorian and modernist self-questioning (so, for example, Ghose and Naidu found in the mannered, highly patterned poetics of decadence a way of insinuating their own distinctive, sinuous 'Oriental line', and William Rothenstein's explorations in Indian culture coincided with Roger Fry's First and Second Post-Impressionist Exhibitions, 1910, 1912). The study will ask whether the cosmopolitan vision of these writers and intellectuals anticipated the development of migrant South Asian and multicultural identities in Britain later in the twentieth century; and, finally, whether the fact that Indian troops held the Ypres salient on behalf of the Allies in 1914-15 can be cast as one of the most decisive and unequivocal ways in which Indians supported and interacted with Britain at this time. Gathering together the significant work in terms of new research and intensive academic and public outreach carried out by 'Making Britain' (including workshops, a massive data base, and a source book covering the entire 1870-1950 span), 'India Arrived, 1870-1914' will consolidate these findings into a structured narrative tracing the early coming-into-being of one of contemporary Britain's most prominent and influential migrant communities. Rather than surveying the wide field, the book will offer an informed and focused critical analysis of British-Indian interaction and its varied and distinctive literary-cultural impacts in a 45-year period.

The primary impact of the 'India Arrived, 1870-1914' project will be to produce a themed monograph on the first distinct and formative phase of South Asian migration to Britain, offering new insights to readers into how Britain has been a cultural and literary home to the sub-continent's migrants for well over a century. Drawing on an interlinked series of case studies of British-Indian collaborations and interactions, the book will engage a wide potential audience with critical reflections on how cross-cultural perceptions at this time operated as dialogic and conversational, not merely as 'othering'. The second impact will be to showcase and consolidate in narrative form the extensive archival research carried out by the current AHRC-funded Standard Research project 'Making Britain' (AH/E009859/1) (2007-10), especially on the period 1870-1914, into the contribution to British life by early South Asian migrant communities. Importantly, however, a third, related impact of 'India Arrived' will be to review, modify and extend the research questions of 'Making Britain', shifting the focus from exploring how Indians in general shaped Britain at the broad levels of social, political and activist inputs, to the more nuanced yet also influential and transformative ways in which Indians intellectuals, writers and other cultural practitioners, experienced, saw and 'read' Britain, and interacted with British culture in the long turn-of-the-century. By mapping a more elaborated network of cross-cultural Indian-British involvement through migration than has been available to date, 'India Arrived' will be of interest to a wide British public, those of diasporic descent, and those concerned with diaspora, migration, multi-cultural British heritage, and race equality in broad terms. It will appeal strongly to audiences enthusiastic about aspects of early migrant life in Britain and the migrant effect on British self-images and identity. The period in question demonstrates idiosyncratic forms of close sharing and hospitality fostered within tightly knit groups of intellectuals and writers, yet anticipates some of the creative exchanges that were to mark artistic partnerships in Britain's diasporic future, as Indian writers and cultural commentators contributed to contemporary ideas of arts and crafts, cultural decadence, cosmopolitanism and the modern. Oxford University Press, the projected publisher, has already indicated it will build on its previous productive collaborations on book promotions with the applicant, and help to draw in the book's broad potential readerships through an extensive programme of book readings, talks and discussions, as well as radio interviews and accompanying podcasts, to coincide with the launch of the volume. The applicant will also tap into her proven experience in disseminating research to a wider public, as with her co-organization of the BL 'Making Britain' exhibition (Sept. 2010-), organization of the 'Asian Bloomsbury' workshop at St John's College, Oxford (July 2008), and successful co-curatorship of the 'Indian Traces in Oxford' exhibition and public workshop at the Bodleian (March 2010). For those involved in debates about multicultural Britain today, the readings and public discussions sparked by the book will offer important insights into the centrality and fullness of Indian involvement in British cultural life from as far back as the late nineteenth century, and into how integral Indian cultural perspectives were to British self-perception and national understanding. It will powerfully dispel misconceptions, increasingly prominent in certain quarters, as regards the allegedly 'add on' or non-integrated aspects of the South Asian migrant presence in Britain. 'India Arrived' will add significantly to its audience's knowledge of the shifting ways in which groups and individuals within Britain h