Anticipatory Anti-Colonial Writing in R.K. Narayan's Swami and Friends and Mulk Raj Anand's Untouchable

This is a repository copy of Anticipatory anti-colonial writing in R.K. Narayan's Swami and Friends and Mulk Raj Anand's Untouchable. White Rose Research Online URL for this paper: http://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/105116/ Version: Accepted Version Article: Barnsley, V. (2014) Anticipatory anti-colonial writing in R.K. Narayan's Swami and Friends and Mulk Raj Anand's Untouchable. Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 50 (6). pp. 730-742. ISSN 1744-9855 https://doi.org/10.1080/17449855.2014.951204 This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in the Journal of Postcolonial Writing on 09 September 2014, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/17449855.2014.951204. Reuse Unless indicated otherwise, fulltext items are protected by copyright with all rights reserved. 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[email protected] https://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/ Anticipatory Anti-colonial Writing in RK Narayans Swami and Friends and Mulk Raj Anands Untouchable Veronica Barnsley University of Manchester, UK Abstract This article uses the term anticipatory anti-colonial writing to discuss the Swami and Friends workingsUntouchable of time. Both in these RK Narayansfirst novels were published inand 1935 Mulk with Raj the Anands 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 Narayansdemands of local empire though (Barrows ironical 2011) resistance a to the homogenizing temporal committed vision. I argue that a form ofnd anticipation Anands awkwardly that explicitly modernist looks sociallyforward to decolonization via new and transnational literary forms is a crucial feature of Untouchable that is not found in Swami and Friends, - colonial elements. Untouchable despite the latters anti s wasand intendedanticipates to postcolonialbe a bridge negotiationsbetween the Gangeof time andthat thecritique Thames global Anand inequalities and rely upon the multidirectional global connections forged by modernism. Keywords: Adam Barrows, anticipation, anti-colonial modernism, decolonization, Indian-English novel, postcolonial times Email: [email protected] 1 Summer, probably 1927. Three men sit in Tavistock Square, WC1, drinking sherry and cultivating an inconspicuous air in case anyone should appear on the steps of number 52.1 The owner of this residence is Leonard Woolf and he is unsure of his wife afternoon. Apologetically, he arranges the gentlemen under as chestnutengagements tree; thathis friend and fellow interlocutor of the British imperial mindset, Morgan Forster, and the young Indian writer Mulk Raj Anand, who recalls the meeting a half-century later in his memoir Conversations in Bloomsbury (1981). Woolf remarks that, in their campaigns for independence, the Indians are sometimes demanding, then abject and continues ironically, And they all long for re-immersion in the Ganges. Back to their past given to them by Max 2 Mueller and Mrs. Besant. (Anand 1995, 78) Anand listens appreciatively to a parody of a worldview that, he notes in the preface to Conversations, has become known as Orientalism. To Anand, Woolf and Forster are two pioneers of freedom and intimacy whose modest of British India (1995, 77). On the edgemanner of the preciousis without world the patriarchal bluff avant-garde and possessing some experience of South Asia, these of Londonsmen are receptive to political and artistic ambition, and his frustration. Anands A incomer to the landscaped cosmopolitanism of Bloomsbury, Anand hasgauche found his feet sufficiently to interrogate Forster about the fate of Fielding and Aziz at the end of A Passage to India Do you think they will come 3 together when India becomes free (1995, 72) The elder writer does not answer and his silence is troubling amidst Conversations lively, sometimes rebarbative, encounters. Forster makes a vague may become the site oftribute freedom, to thebefore miscellaneous leaving to catch hotchpotchhis train (1995, of )ndia 78). that This unresolved debate between men who consider themselves progressive humanists resonates with the unanswered questions that are amassed in Untouchable (1935). Begun during the twenties but rejected Anandsby fifteen first publishers novel before finally being accepted with a Preface by Forster, the Email: [email protected] 2 novel turns the of colonial India into a subaltern drama that anticipates an anti-colonial,hotchpotch transnational literature (Cowasjee 1972, 49-56). In Roots and Flowers, Anand acknowledges that t -a- of the modern novel might seem, like heIndia, timebound cha work day world Forsterssts to confront theotic and plotless(Anand constrained1972, 18) These, by the however, need for are creative productive arti limitations becauseir own the questionstime articulated through the subaltern consciousness of Bakha, -anti- of Untouchable, anticipate how - economically, politically andthe socia herolly changehero 4 might be lived. In 1936 Anand was one of the authors of the inaugural manifesto of the All-India Progressive Writers Association (later known as the PWA), a document that evinces a future-orientated Socialism optimistic in its epochal vision but emphatic about the self-critique and work that postcolonial reconstruction (as opposed to rebirth) will take. (Gopal 2005, 14)5 The PWA was responsive both to social issues in India, including caste reform, and left-wing cultural mo a fresh s to writers.vements (Gopal in Europe 2005, 2) that Anand brought thereby committedense of hims interventionaryelf to a literature urgency aiming to express the stratified and multiple political processes of global modernization. (Gaonkar 1999, 1-18) Anand sees his with a history of resistance by activistposition Indian students as both partwho of preceded an historical him innow London, for Indian freedom and 6 social equality.and as forever in its commitment to fight In Untouchable Anand combines his future-driven political programme with an involvement in moderni modes of time (non-linearst representationsor non-standard) of time and the self using unreal viato a connect representation the now of ofthe immediate subaltern experience with the therefore forever rejects of liberation what Fredric Jameson has termed the mind Anands text of A Passage to India, associating it with the language of infinity of at the close , not with the modernist milieu. illusionism(Jameson 1990, Rabindranath58-59) Tagores work I must know whether politics was admissible(is reason in fora novel. quizzing(1995, Forster 71) Anandis ) felt is true to Woolfs Email: [email protected] 3 tongue-in-cheek assessment of Indians: demanding in wanting an answer, rather than a carefully choreographed refusal, and abject when he does not get one. According to the late-imperial perspective that Woolf plays upon, India is associated with childish proclivities, reliant upon Britain for protection and development. In Conversations, Anand own childlike inferiority somewhat disconcertingly becomess insistence a strat uponegy his for promoting the Indian-English novel, a form that was frequently dismissed. George Orwell wrote -language Indian literature is a strange phenomenon, in(Orwell 1968,that an 216) English while Virginia Woolf refers to An - and Indian culture as unchanging. (Anand 1995, 104)ands Anand writing seizes as on child the like expectation that children can be unruly and challenging, as well as simple, turning it to his advantage comme as thegrown- presenterup cultural interviewer arena. (Verma reporter 1993, and 181) ntator upon Londons This pose of the awkward child is also utilized in Untouchable and goes on to be a prominent feature of Indian writing after the 1930s. (Singh 2010, 13-18) It is, in , a paradoxical position because he presents himself as a child Anandsentering casea grown-up world whilst claiming to produce work that will sweep it away. This contradiction operates at the level of literary form in that the very methods of modernist experimental writing that have been criticized as metropolitan and elitist are those that colonial writers, including Anand, drew upon to produce resistant texts in the mid-twentieth century (Gikandi 2006, 421). This paradox is important in considering anticipatory anti-colonial writing because, if colonial aesthetic forms can no longer be considered derivative or peripheral (Parry 2009, 27- constitutive (Barrows 2011, 16), they can be butappreciated rather are as deliberatelyof inventive, modernist even art impertinent, in demanding that differences be acknowledged and changes be made, even as they participate in recognized metropolitan forms.7 Anticipation (of recognition, an answer,

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