South Asian broadcasters in Britain and the BBC: talking to India (1941–1943)

Abstract

This paper explores the contributions of key diasporic South Asian writers and intellectuals, such as Mulk Raj Anand, to the BBC’s broadcasts to India during the Second World War (1941–1943) when the tensions between nationalism, anti‐fascism and anti‐imperialism were intense. It explores how diasporic South Asian writers in Britain dealt with these tensions. It analyses how their different responses to these tensions found literary expression, and how media and cultural critics responded to these literary texts. It argues that the BBC did not speak with a unitary voice but provided a transcultural contact zone in metropolitan London and in doing so fostered intellectual networks in which diasporic Indian nationalism could be debated and critiqued.

Keywords:

• South Asian broadcasters
• BBC Indian Service
• Second World War
• propaganda
• Mulk Raj Anand
• George Orwell

Acknowledgements

The author gratefully acknowledges support from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) funded project ‘Making Britain’ (Grant Number AH/E009859/1).

Notes

1. This article extends my research on South Asian broadcasters at the BBC undertaken for my monograph South Asian Writers in Twentieth‐Century Britain (Oxford University Press, 2007). It also forms part of a wider three‐year AHRC‐funded Project entitled Making Britain: South Asian Visions of Home and Abroad 1870–1950 led by Professor Susheila Nasta (Principal Investigator) of the Open University, in partnership with The British Library and SALIDAA. Details of the project can be found at www.open.ac.uk/arts/south-asians-making-britain (The findings of this paper are partially indebted to the funding provided by the AHRC and the collaborative exchanges of the project team. An earlier version was given at the BBC conference in December 2007.)

2. The magazine was entitled Indian Writing although one of the editors, Alagu Subramaniam, and several contributors were Sri Lankan (or Ceylonese to use the terminology of the time) including Pieter Keuneman and J Vijaya‐tunge: their identity was subsumed as Indian. As the editorial explains: ‘The bulk of the material in Indian Writing must necessarily be Indian. At the same time however, we will publish the writings of other oppressed peoples with whom we share a common background of experience and aspiration’ (Anonymous 1940, 4).

3. Some months later Anand participated in the BBC Indian Section’s Open Letter Series with his ‘Open Letter to a Chinese Guerrilla’ broadcast on 30 July 1942. His contributions were in keeping with the socialist concerns that animate his fiction. He also interviewed a soldier on 13 November 1942, a member of the merchant navy on 20 November 1942, and a canteen worker on 18 December 1942 for the ‘A Day in the Life’ series.

4. See also Bleumel (2004, 2009) and the growing body of work on non‐metropolitan modernisms, notably Mitter (2007).