Book Review: South Asian Writers in Twentieth-Century Britain

South Asian Writers in Twentieth-Century Britain: Culture in Translation
by Ruvani Ranasinha

New York: Oxford Univ. Press. 2007; 302 pp. ISBN 978-0-19-920777-0
“So if a writer decides his/her audience is in the English speaking West then s/he has to write in relation to the West and accede to be read accordingly. In other words s/he will have to deal with the colonial encounter and its repercussions especially in the formation of her/his identity. The writer will have to play by their current rules and be read according to their feelings of guilt or glory.” G.J.V. Prasad

Tracing the publication and reception of South Asian Anglophone writing in 20th century Britain in her book, South Asian Writers in Twentieth Century Britain: Culture in Translation, Ruvani Ranasinha makes a somewhat similar observation, that ‘minority discourse is often shaped by the complex demands of various sections of the mainstream’ (p. 8). Her monograph sets out to ‘demonstrate the ways in which shifting political, academic, and commercial agendas in Britain and North America have influenced the selection, content and consumption of many books’ by South Asian authors (ibid). Ranasinha investigates the roles of reviewers and publishers as mediators between the writer and the reading public, and also proposes fresh interpretations of terms like translation, migration, hybridity and multiculturalism.

In the first section of the monograph, Ruvani Ranasinha presents a detailed and clear analysis of the changing market for South Asian writing, starting with the publication and reception of writers like Raja Rao, Mulk Raj Anand and R.K. Narayan in the 1930s and 1940s. Some of these writers had successfully resisted the demands from their publishers to confirm to Eurocentric standards. On the other hand, she also analyzes the role of cultural and academic institutions in Britain in aiding the conformism displayed by some other South Asian writers of this time. Tracing important events and processes such as the rise of Commonwealth Literature, the emergence of ‘Black’ as a political category and the birth of ‘British Asian’ identity, she skillfully maps the noticeable shifts in the British interest in South Asian writing, which albeit remained confined to Anglophone literary outputs.

Defining cultural translation as a steady interchange between mainstream and minority codes, Ranasinha further suggests that this cross-cultural confrontation for the South Asian writers often ‘includes an invention, imitation or creation of identity’ (p. 266). In order to get a generational perspective on the changing discourse on migrant identity, the author compares writings in the Indian sub-continent from a decade before the Independence until the present. While the choice of the eight writers that she discusses in her monograph is not exhaustive, the juxtaposition of the writers against each other is a novel idea and follows a clear structure. Ranasinha moves chronologically from discussing Nirad C. Chaudhuri’s and M.J. Tambimuttu’s self translation through autobiographical modes to wider, public forms of history in the writings of Kamla Markandaya and A. Sivanandan. With Farrukh Dhondy and Salman Rushdie the focus of writing has shifted, she asserts, from questions of assimilation to the new-found space of migrancy and hybridity. Finally, Ranasinha takes up Hanif Kureishi and Meera Syal to discuss their engagement with the issues of minority identity.

In the writings of Nirad Chaudhury and Tambimuttu, Ruvani Ranasinha explores two modes of self-translation – assimilative and ‘foreignising’. She points out that both these writers share an elitist outlook, a patriarchal, anti-national cosmopolitanism, and Eurocentric universalism. However, their adoption of contrasting modes of self-translation points to shifting constructions of cultural difference. Chaudhury’s early alienation from his native culture made him live like an exile in his own country and also led him to create an idealized, imaginary Britain in his works. The author contends that Chaudhury’s valorization of the English culture and justification of colonial rule in India helped him with good reviews in Britain initially. However, his continued clinging to obsolete notions of Englishness, his support of outdated colonial ideologies and his criticism of what he thought of as decadence in multi-cultural Britain made him an anachronism. On the other hand, Tambimuttu continuously evolved in response to expectations of culture difference. On his arrival in Britain, he consciously manipulated the orientalist discourse on cultural difference and the class consciousness of the British to gain immediate acceptance. He did so by creating for himself an ethnic identity and a royal ancestry. On his arrival in the U.S. in 1952, Tambimuttu similarly gauged the expectations in the New World and this time grew more assertive about his ethnicity, downplaying the royal connections. Coming back to Britain once again in 1968, he re-invented himself by taking an anti-colonial stance. Ranasinha successfully points to the irony of the situation where Tambimuttu’s assertion of ‘difference’ contributes to his acceptance in the mainstream, whereas Chaudhury, despite his desire to be British, is categorized an Indian. To the author this clearly points to the dominance of mainstream ideas on cultural difference.

Moving on, Ranasinha points out that both Kamla Markandaya and A. Sivanandan, foreground the clash between tradition and modernity in postcolonial states, erosion of historical memory during colonial times, and the re-writing of the nation’s past from the point of view of the colonized. But that, according to the author, is where the similarity ends. For whereas Sivanandan believes that literature must challenge, engage with or contribute to politics, Markandaya is of the view that the ‘didactic novelist is a poor novelist’. Like Tambimuttu, Markandaya chose to play to the exoticised versions of the East in order to assimilate. Citing Markandaya’s novels as a case in point, Ranasinha makes an interesting observation – that assimilation to the target culture does not always happen by minimizing the foreign content in one’s works; it is the emphasis on the ‘foreign’ that helps, albeit in a ‘language’ understood by the target culture. She points out that Markandaya’s work sells the concept of Third World women as victims of patriarchy and underdevelopment. Ranasinha criticizes, if somewhat unreasonably, Markandaya resistance to a representative role as an Asian woman writer, finding it both ‘self-effacing’ and ‘gender-inflected’.

A. Sivanandan, on the other hand, uses a semi-autobiographical character to portray the collective history of Sri Lanka. His perceptions of Sri Lanka’s race and class dynamics both feed into and are reinforced in his works by his immersion into black British socialist politics. However, Ranasinha book does not extend the analysis to include Sivanandan’s latest views in relation to the recent pressure on British Muslims to integrate, where he distinguishes between multicultural society and multiculturalism (the latter he prefers to call ‘culturalism’). His argument is that neither integration nor assimilation can prevent racialism and the answer for him lies in anti-globalisation and anti-imperialist movements (see his article, Why Muslims Reject British Values).

Farrukh Dhondy and Salman Rushdie differ from the earlier generation of South Asian writers because of their distance from the colonial era, and from their Anglophone successors who live in Britain in that Dhondy and Rushdie have closer knowledge of their countries of origin. Although both of them come from anglicized minority environments in India and moved to England for education, Rushdie’s family was more privileged, and this Ranasinha feels, might explain their differing politics and trajectories. Dhondy became part of an activist Left politics. In the beginning he fought against the negative portrayals of not only minorities but also their countries of origin in the media. He also wrote for theater and television thereby bringing the minority culture to the popular media and paved the way for writers like Meera Syal and Hanif Kureishi. Ranasinha points out to Dhondy’s contribution also in ‘moving away from the politics of positive image to the development of a specular, self-reflexive critique of British black and Asian culture…which allowed it to develop its own inherent cultural dynamics’ (p. 203) Ranasinha thus usefully points out his anti-assimilation stance. However, she misses out on an analysis of the shift in Dhondy’s views, post 9/11. Although Ranasinha very briefly mentions Dhondy’s criticism of multiculturalism, yet what is more important and could have found a mention in her book is his criticism of Islam or what he calls a ‘barbaric interpretation of Islam’ and also his idea of the ‘fundamentalist Muslim’ versus the ‘Western Muslim’ (see Our Islamic Fifth Column).

Ranasinha’s analysis of Salman Rushdie’s works, his deft handling of the literary devices at his disposal, be it magic realism or the subversion of Standard English, covers all aspects of his work without saying anything new. She does not once question either his (or Bhabha’s) valorization of ‘the migrant’, or if his espousal of the Eurocentric post-modernist theories had a role in his immediate acceptance with the western critics. She also skips a discussion on how the Satanic Verses and the resultant fatwa affected/ helped Rushdie’s reputation in the west. For informed readers of Rushdie, the novelty lies only in his comparison to Dhondy which in this case may not be very satisfying.

Quoting Stuart Hall that identity does not precede representation, but rather is ‘always in process, and always constituted within, not outside representation’ (p. 227), Ranasinha moves on to discuss the ‘politics of representation’ by British-born writers and film-makers Hanif Kureishi and Meera Syal. According to her, they differ from their predecessors particularly in their ‘role as cultural mediators’ (p. 221), and their work charts the relationship between postcolonialism and multiculturalism addressing, in particular, the legacy of colonialism. Rather than focus on conflicts between cultures, Kuresishi and Syal portray discord between generations and within British-Indian communities to ‘disturb binary polarities that equate the first immigrant generation with tradition and the second with modernity’ (p. 225).
The status of minority writer brings with itself the ‘burden of representation’, but both Kureishi and Syal contest such claims. Ranasinha’s previous research on Kureishi makes her discussion of the writer well-informed and nuanced. She perceptively argues that Kureishi’s ‘resistance to oppressive forms of identification stemming from notions of community around ethnicity’ (p. 245) is not just an assertion of independence but also a rejection of political commitment. She points to his stereotypical representation of Islamic fundamentalism in his later work and concludes that Kureishi’s work was ‘amenable to the British because it was less confrontational’. In contrast, Ranasinha observes, Syal’s work is more politically engaged, however, what makes her criticism palatable is her warm humour and the fact that the Punjabi Hindu community she satirises is more prosperous and less alienated that the Pakistani and Bangladeshi Muslims that are Hanif Kureishi’s subjects.

On the whole Ruvani Ranasinha’s book is an excellent study that provides a detailed materialist history to production and consumption of South Asian writing in 20th century Britain. It successfully argues that the ‘literary quality’ of a book is not the only criterion; publishing and review apparatuses play a significant role in the selection, publication and reception of texts. The comparative study of two writers from a similar generation is novel if not always even. A structure where writers are compared because they are contemporaries (but only roughly), brings together writers who may not be inherently comparable. For example comparing Sivanandan, a political activist, to a basically non-political writer like Markandaya is a little lopsided. On the other hand, this bracketing technique also limits the discussion on writers like Sivanandan to a particular time period. Indeed, a comparative analysis of political views of Sivanandan who is still writing and Dhondy’s recent opinions would produce interesting results.

Another discussion that could have added to this study is the issue of South Asian writers still writing from their native countries (especially as Ranasinha moves the discussion to second generation migrant writers) and if their writing in any way connects to the cultural translation in Britain. However, if one had to find one serious weakness in Ranasiha’s monograph , it would be the analysis of Salman Rushdie’s work. After the wonderfully balanced study of Nirad Chaudhury or the relentless critique of Kamla Markandaya it is difficult to fathom why Ranasinha accepts Rushdie’s literary reputation with an uncharacteristic awe.

Despite these suggestions, which only go to show how a good book raises the level of readers’ expectations, Ruvani Ranasinha’s book is extensively researched and original. It should interest not only scholars of literature and cultural studies but also those who are interested in South Asian writing.
References:
Dhondy, F. Our Islamic Fifth Column. www.city-journal.org
Prasad, G.J.V. ‘Reply-paid Post-colonialism’. Interrogating Post-colonialism, eds. Harish Trivedi, Meenakshi Mukherjee. Shimla: IIAS, 1996.
Sivanandan, A. Why Muslims Reject British Values. The Observer (16 Oct. 2005), online edition.

This review first appeared in the journal, Confluence: South Asian Perspective