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This chapter offers a broad literary and structural history of South Asian Anglophone writing published in Britain. Early writers like Mulk Raj Anand and Nirad Chaudhuri need to be seen in terms of modernist traditions, rather than what one might call the current literary apartheid of examining black and white modernist writers separately. For Anand, Raja Rao, and others, English was a weapon, as well as a key to the ideological arsenal in the struggle for independence: their writings in English reflected their emergent nationalism. Drawing on previously unpublished correspondence between Rao and his publisher Allen and Unwin, this chapter documents how Rao was requested to erase his cultural origins in his work so that he could assimilate and be accepted by the centre. Such demands are part of the metropolitan expectation for minority writers to conform to ‘universalist’ criteria. This amounts to a Eurocentrism, masked as the ‘universality’ of the human condition that neglects the local socio-political context of the country of ‘origin’ and conceals the refusal of Western audiences to engage with the unfamiliar.

This chapter tackles the question of colonialism by exploring the connection between James Joyce and Mulk Raj Anand. It examines the complex correspondences that link Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) and Ulysses (1918) to Anand's Untouchable (1935) and Coolie (1936). The chapter argues that the works of Joyce and Anand are a complex textual exchange that highlights the geographical specificity of their colonial critiques. A reading of Anand's works reveals that his modernism links back to Joyce's work, situated within a broader postcolonial geography. This modernist narrative helps Anand craft a cosmopolitan Indian modernism rooted in matters of caste, poverty, national identity, and colonial status in India. The chapter concludes by discussing how both writers revise the tradition of the bildungsroman, using narrative experimentation to challenge the political model of the exemplary, representative man within the geographical spaces of colonial modernity.

This chapter discusses how the Marxist critics of “the radical 1930s” frequently overlooked the efforts of colonial writers of socialist fiction, such as Mulk Raj Anand, who apparently fits into the projects of subaltern studies and comparative literature. Anand was initially viewed as a nationalist anticolonial writer. However, his 1936 novel, Coolie, is in fact set within the context of the global trade depression and currency crisis. It is a re-sketching of Rudyard Kipling's imperial adventure story, Kim, in terms of depicting migrant coolie labor (a child-worker's search for work). The novel attempts to reconstruct history and theory to a tradition of literary internationalism and nonrevolutionary socialism prompted by anticolonial labor struggles.

This chapter focuses on the early Anglophone writers Mulk Raj Anand and Raja Rao, who, in the spirit of Gandhism, are determined to read caste. The seminal text on caste in the English language, Anand's Untouchable (1935), set a kind of literary precedent for the representation of untouchability. It argues that for a writer like Anand modernist form allowed for a particular reading of untouchability, symptomized by the problem of labor, and the problem of metaphor. It is via Marxism and metaphor that untouchability in the novel may become a universalized condition of subjection. Contemporary Dalit texts, however, deny the very category of the universal by advocating a logic of particularism, localism, and non-transferable specificity. Working through structuralist readings of metaphor, the chapter demonstrates how narratively, in several Dalit short stories, the question of labor gravitates away from the abstract worker towards the particularized problem of casteized occuption, via a reliance on the metonymic modes of the realist.

This introductory chapter outlines the role of the modernist narrative in linking ethics and politics using the novel Untouchable (1935) by Indian writer Mulk Raj Anand as an example. The novel tells the story of Bakha, an “untouchable” working as a sweeper and cleaner of latrines. Untouchable was one of the first novels to feature a member of the outcaste as a hero, documenting the conflict between Bakha's obligations as a sweeper and his rising ethical awareness, which grows over the course of the novel. The story also revolves around the argument for eradicating the caste system in India. The chapter describes how modernist narrative connects ethical attitudes and responsibilities to the active creation of political relationships and just conduct. It argues that the act of narration, which goes between and among people, constitutes a “web of human relations” in which political action takes place.

Undivided India contributed to the First World War more than one million men who served in places as diverse as France, Mesopotamia and East Africa and forged a remarkable range of encounters across the lines of race, religion and nationality. This essay investigates the fraught inner histories of these encounters – their affective, experiential and representational structures – through a range of archival, historical and literary material, as produced by Indian combatant and civilian writers, including Mulk Raj Anand and Rabindranath Tagore. Focusing on three kinds of encounters – behind the battlefield of the Western Front, in a hospital in Mesopotamia, and a series of wartime lectures delivered in the United States – it reflects on the role of the ‘literary’ in such cross-cultural encounters and their representations, and how such moments and processes at once expand our understandings of a more ‘global’ war and put pressure on conventional understandings of ideas of ‘modernity’ and ‘cosmopolitanism’.

This chapter focuses on Mulk Raj Anand. Anand's intellectual world was framed by politics, but his concern was largely with social reform and with culture—with art, aesthetics, and with literature. He was very much the social realist, sharply conscious of inequalities and fissures caused by tradition and by urbanization. It is difficult to identify specific influences in Anand's work, given the encyclopaedic reach of his interests, but the intellectuals and writers associated with Bloomsbury shaped his understanding of modernity. He was also inspired by a number of Indian saints and thinkers, but Jawaharlal Nehru and Mahatma Gandhi were central to shaping the course of Anand's early work. Very much like Gandhi and Nehru, he too attempted to reconcile the claims of modernity and tradition in his fiction and his critical writing.

The theme of toilets in particular, and waste in general, permeates the cultural production of the Chinese diaspora. This chapter analyzes the toilet as an element of material culture that usually remains invisible and yet in Chinese diasporic literature is assigned an important cultural value as a site for cross-cultural encounters. It is interesting to note that other diasporic Asian literatures do not share this thematic emphasis, with the exception of South Asian texts that deal with the issue of caste and of the “untouchables” whose caste-prescribed duties include cleaning toilets. Mulk Raj Anand's 1935 novel Untouchable is a classic of this type. The emphasis upon the toilet as an icon of cultural transformation and subjective conflict specifically in Chinese diaspora writings seems to be a feature of, more or less, latent Orientalism in westernized discourses of cultural “Chineseness.”

This chapter argues that Bhagat Singh’s jail notebook is central to understanding revolutionary reading. Reading is revolutionary because it is not in the service of future mastery or authority, but rather reading (especially in the face of certain death) theorizes its own inconsequentiality. This is revolutionary because it asserts a radical antiauthoritarianism.

Narayan’s goals were as serious as those of the novelists who wrote before him in south India. He achieved his results with a delicate touch. To a tradition of thematic gravity, he brought a transparent and deliberately ‘unstudied’ voice and humour. The restraint and the art of poise were cultivated by Narayan himself. His temperament helped and circumstances took a hand; but he had learnt from the south-Indian example performance. Narayan mentioned the sources of his inspiration: elements that would normally stimulate one to write. And for him these are curiosity, interest in people, interest in one’s surroundings, a desire for achievement of any sort, or for a future.

Ranga Rao furthers his critique by picking up Narayan’s debut novel, Swami and Friends. The very simplicity of the story signals thrifty talent and daring originality of theme. This novel also establishes the character of Malgudi, a small town located in a corner of south India. Swami and Friends also presents a basic plan common to so many of Narayan’s novels, that is, an uprooting followed by a return, a renewal, and a restoration of normalcy. The protagonist, Swami, establishes the sattvic temper, the truth-searching mind, the conscionability, which are the hallmarks of Narayan’s heroes, especially, of the pre-Independence novels. The slim novel is also epochal in the history of the Indian novel in English: one of the three novels—with Anand’s Untouchable and Raja Rao’s Kanthapura—in the 1930s, launching a new phase in the development of the Indian novel in English.