Anticipatory anti-colonial writing in R.K. Narayan’s Swami and Friends and Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable

Abstract

This article uses the term “anticipatory anti-colonial writing” to discuss the workings of time in R.K. Narayan’s Swami and Friends and Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable. Both these first novels were published in 1935 with the support of British literary personalities (Graham Greene and E.M. Forster respectively) and both feature young protagonists who, in contrasting ways, are engaged in Indian resistance to colonial rule. This study examines the difference between Narayan’s local, though ironical, resistance to the homogenizing temporal demands of empire and Anand’s awkwardly modernist, socially committed vision. I argue that a form of anticipation that explicitly looks forward to decolonization via new and transnational literary forms is a crucial feature of Untouchable that is not found in Swami and Friends, despite the latter’s anti-colonial elements. Untouchable was intended to be a “bridge between the Ganges and the Thames” and anticipates postcolonial negotiations of time that critique global inequalities and rely upon the multidirectional global connections forged by modernism.

Keywords:

• Adam Barrows
• anticipation
• anti-colonial modernism
• decolonization
• Indian-English novel
• postcolonial times

Notes

1. Number 52 Tavistock Square was the primary residence of Leonard and Virginia Woolf, and the office of the Hogarth Press between 1924–1939, until it was destroyed in the Blitz. A bust of Mahatma Gandhi was erected in the square in 1968 and in one corner is a bust of Virginia Woolf.

2. Anand left Punjab for London in 1924 with the assistance of the freedom campaigner Annie Besant, having briefly been imprisoned for his part in the non-cooperation movement. He studied philosophy at University College London and worked as a writer and critic, returning to India permanently in 1945. No precise dates are given in Conversations in Bloomsbury.

3. Sara Blair (2004, 823) positions Anand amongst radicals active at the “command centre” of imperial culture, while Anna Snaith calls him a “creator of an alternative map of modernist London” (2014, 10). This article considers his radicalism as anticipatory, noting that Bloomsbury’s cosmopolitanism has been read as heralding the mobile inhabitations of postcolonial cities.

4. Anand uses the term “hero-anti-hero” in An Apology for Heroism and Roots and Flowers to refer to the protagonist of the modern novel. In the preface to Conversations in Bloomsbury he applies it to Aziz in A Passage to India. Ranajit Guha defines “subaltern” as “a name for the general attribute of subordination in South Asian society whether this is expressed in terms of class, caste, age, gender and office or in any other way” (1982, vii).

5. The manifesto published by the PWA in London’s Left Review in February 1935 was reprinted in Coppola (1974, 6–7). An edited version was published in the Hindi journal Hans (Swan) in October 1935 by Premchand (Dhanpat Rai). A prolific writer in Hindi whose novels deal with social conflict and peasant life, Rai died soon after the inaugural conference of the PWA in 1936.

6. On early-20th-century Indian resistance in London, see Tickell (2012, 135–183).

7. Berman (2006), Bluemel (2004) and Stanford Friedman (2006) argue for an expanded understanding of modernist practice beyond the “high-modernist” metropolitan moment that facilitates my reading of Anand.

8. Narayan received a telegram saying “Novel taken. Graham Greene responsible” (Narayan 2002, 115).

9. Anand’s work has often been sidelined as Gorkyesque realism; Priya Joshi asserts that it has little “literary merit” except in “photographic fidelity” (2002, 211) and Leela Gandhi limits her comments to “social realism” (2003, 168). However, critics of his work interested in global modernisms have begun to use “a more wide-angled and global lens” (Nasta 2008, 156).

10. Narayan’s first image of Malgudi is said to have been the train station, later popularized in a drawing made by his brother (Kumar 2011, 564).

11. In 1870, Madras time was designated as railway time while a single time zone was created in 1906. Calcutta kept its own time until 1945 and Bombay unofficially until 1955.

12. Gandhi is prominent in Indian fiction of this period but entirely absent in British fiction (Tickell 2012, 122).

13. Leonard Woolf’s introduction was removed from subsequent editions at Anand’s request and resulted in a lively exchange between Woolf and Orwell, both friends of Anand (Orwell 2001, 173–176).