Radio Empire: The BBC’s Eastern Service and the Emergence of the Global Anglophone Novel 9780231552592

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RADIO EMPIRE

MODERNIST LATITUDES

MODERNIST LATITUDES Jessica Berman and Paul Saint-Amour, Editors Modernist Latitudes aims to capture the energy and ferment of modernist studies by continuing to open up the range of forms, locations, temporalities, and theoretical approaches encompassed by the field. The series celebrates the growing latitude (“scope for freedom of action or thought”) that this broadening affords scholars of modernism, whether they are investigating little-known works or revisiting canonical ones. Modernist Latitudes will pay particular attention to the texts and contexts of those latitudes (Africa, Latin America, Australia, Asia, Southern Europe, and even the rural United States) that have long been misrecognized as ancillary to the canonical modernisms of the global North. For a complete list of books in the series, see page 272

Radio Empire THE BBC’S EASTERN SERVICE AND THE EMERGENCE OF T H E G LO B A L A N G LO P H O N E N O V E L

Daniel Ryan Morse

Columbia University Press New York

Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893 New York Chichester, West Sussex cup.columbia.edu Copyright © 2020 Columbia University Press All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Morse, Daniel Ryan, author. Title: Radio empire : the BBC’s Eastern Service and the emergence of the global anglophone novel / Daniel Ryan Morse. Description: New York City : Columbia University Press, 2020. | Series: Modernist latitudes | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020009242 (print) | LCCN 2020009243 (ebook) | ISBN 9780231198363 (cloth) | ISBN 9780231198370 (paperback) | ISBN 9780231552592 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: English fiction—20th century—History and criticism. | English fiction—Foreign countries—History and crticism. | BBC World Service—History— 20th century. | Radio broadcasting, British—History—20th century. | Radio and literature—Great Britain. Classification: LCC PN1991.8.L5 M67 2020 (print) | LCC PN1991.8.L5 (ebook) | DDC 823/.9093558—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020009242 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020009243

Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. Printed in the United States of America Cover design: Noah Arlow Cover photo: © BBC

For Casey

CONTENTS

L I S T O F I L LU ST R AT IO N S

AC K N OW L E D G M E N T S

ix xi

Introduction 1 Chapter One Finnegans Waves: James Joyce Between the BBC and 2RN 39 Chapter Two Reviewing Some Books: E. M. Forster as Blind Uncle 77 Chapter Three The End of Empire: Mulk Raj Anand’s Comparative Modernisms 114 Chapter Four Intimate and Kaleidosonic Styles: Attia Hosain, Venu Chitale, and the Hybrid Novel 151 Epilogue: The Eastern Service in the Era of Decolonization 187 NOTES

199

B I B L IO G R A P H Y

INDEX

255

241

ILLUSTRATIONS

FIGURE 0.1

FIGURE 2.1

FIGURE 3.1 FIGURE 3.2 FIGURE 4.1

Mulk Raj Anand broadcasting on the BBC Eastern Service in 1942 2 E. M. Forster consults with Z. A. Bokhari, Indian program organizer 82 Voice, BBC Eastern Service, 1942 116 Cover of first issue of the little magazine Indian Writing 123 Attia Hosain acting in an adaptation of Antony and Cleopatra, BBC Eastern Service, Pakistan Section, 1952 153

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

In a book about communication at great distances, I begin by thanking the many far-flung interlocutors who made this work possible. My father is an inveterate consulter of the dictionary and rabid listener to WBUR, where I first heard the BBC World Service. This “morse-erse wordybook” was in many ways prepared by his diligence and that of my mother—avid reader as well—who mixed in the sounds of another British invasion during family car rides. Thanks to my sisters Kerry and Colleen for singing along and adding Bryan, Chris, Mikaela, Chloe, Bobby, Liv, Carole, and Scrumpy to the mix. I thank my entire extended family, but particularly my grandmother Eileen Morse, a librarian, and my grandfather Charles Ryan, who—while serving in the Pacific—was likely within range of the broadcasts I discuss in this book. Terry, Len, and Jolie Bell have been wonderfully supportive throughout. And a wider cast of characters helped me begin: the Forges, Rizzos, and Rubins, Jeremy Love, Adrien Kanter, Guillaume and Katia, Jenn McGill, Eric Freda, Aaron Leitko, Ed Brant, Mike Petillo, Sean McGuiness, Brandon and Lindsey, Laura and Eric, Mike Stein, Dan Davey, Andrew Loomis, Jay Piques, Brian Sullivan, Jeff White, and Chris Mara. Brian Pray didn’t live to see this book into print, but his contagious laugh still echoes in my head. Priya Joshi envisioned this book when it was nothing but a tentative seminar paper proposal and has worked tirelessly to aid its writing ever since.

xii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

For the innumerable meetings, rounds of feedback, words of encouragement, cups of coffee (and wine), and unstinting solidarity and friendship, she deserves a medal for best mentor. Paul Saint-Amour kindly allowed me to join his Finnegans Wake seminar and has been a generous reader and mentor ever since, asking project-altering questions, showing me where I need to be more Paul McCartney and less Kevin Shields, and bringing to light the best possible aspects of things I didn’t see myself. I aspire to be half as good to my students as Paul was to me. Shelly Brivic was a Joycean force, an eager reader, and sharp critic. Late in the process Jim English helped to put things in perspective. My modernist imagination was first fired at the George Washington University thanks to Jennifer Green-Lewis, Tara Wallace, Robert Ganz, and the endlessly patient Gil Harris. Mel Micir inspired and gently guided me then and ever since. In Philadelphia I had the great fortune of brilliant interlocutors at Temple, including Janet Neigh, Ted Howell, Sara Curnow Wilson, Steve Newman, Larry Venuti, Eli Goldblatt, Peter Logan, Dan O’Hara, and Oliver Gaycken. The folks at Penn were so welcoming that it quickly became a second home; thanks to Jed Esty, Beth Blum, Heather Love, Julia Bloch, Grace Lavery, Phil Maciak, Cliff Mak, Kelly Rich, Lance Wahlert, Amardeep Singh, Jason Zuzga, John Tresch, Mara Mills, Amy Paeth, Katie Price, Suvir Kaul, Ania Loomba, and Tsitsi Jaji. For sustaining me between jobs, thanks are due to everyone at the Rosenbach Museum & Library and the University of Delaware (especially Peter Feng, Jordan Howell, Joe Harris, Emily Davis, and Alex McKee). I had the great fortune to run into a particularly collegial bunch of good listeners in and around modernist radio studies. Todd Avery set the stage, genially tolerated my endless questions, and pointed me to invaluable sources. Debra Rae Cohen and Michael Coyle gave me an early boost in their MSA seminar-turned-special-journal-issue, and Debra Rae has sharpened this project in many subsequent conversations. Emily Bloom shared comments and questions on many iterations of this book over the years, and I thank her for her generosity and comradeship. I have been lucky to talk to, present alongside, and befriend thoughtful scholars, including Damien Keane, Susheila Nasta, Jap-Nanak Makkar, Jen Nesbitt, Matt Rubery, Ian Whittington, Sejal Sutaria, Pragya Dhital, Julie Cyzewski, Allan Hepburn, Richard Legay, Hedwig Wagner, Tobias Hochscherf, Peter Kalliney, Akshya Saxena, and Nora Prochaska (Rest in Power).

xiii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

At the University of Nevada, Reno, I’ve been surrounded by a fantastic group of modernists: Katherine Fusco, Nasia Anam, Pardis Dabashi, Ragini Srinivasan, Stephen Pasqualina, Marshall Johnson, Seth Cosimini, Brendan Johnston, and Laura Brownell. Debra Moddelmog has always been an enthusiastic supporter of this book and scholar. I’m grateful for research assistance from Harrison Blackman (who tracked down archival material at Princeton), Monique McDade (who was instrumental in processing endless radio scripts), and December Cuccaro. Two chairs have actively supported this project over the years: Eric Rasmussen through meals by the Thames, Truckee, and Potomac, and Ashley Marshall via bike rides, beers, and repeated reassurances. The larger department is unusually collegial, and for that I thank the entire Frandsen Alpine Club, especially Cami Allen, Mike Branch, Cathy Chaput, Ian Clayton, Chris Coake, Dennis Cronan, Jane Detweiler, David Durham, Chris Earle, Lupe Escobar, David Fenimore, Elizabeth Francis, Valerie Fridland, Steve Gehrke, Justin Gifford, Jen Hill, Ann Keniston, Jason Ludden, James Mardock, Elisabeth Miller, Ignacio Montoya, Lynda Olman, Jared Stanley, Alissa Surges, Blake Watson, and Jim Webber. Outside of English, the following have made UNR more wonderful: Louis Niebur, Sam Buchanan, Daniel Enrique Pérez, Debbie Boehm, Emily Hobson, Felicia Perez, Lydia Huerta, Patrick Jackson, Deborah Achtenberg, Ximena Serrano, Albert Lee, Julianne Lindberg, Ruthie Meadows, Chris Church, Dennis Dworkin, Meredith Oda, Ned Schoolman, Isabelle Favre, and Ben Birkinbine. Chris Mays deserves his own category as friend, confidant, bandmate, and colleague; his is an all-too-rare combination of equal parts talent, modesty, and kindness, and I only wish I had met him sooner. As for so many in my generation, the early days of this book were marked by precarity. I was able to afford health insurance while working as an adjunct professor only because of the bravery of those who campaigned and voted for the Affordable Care Act. I had health insurance as a graduate student only because of the dedicated work of the Temple University Graduate Students’ Association. Thanks are due as well to everyone who formed and sustain the United Academics of Philadelphia and the Nevada Faculty Alliance. Anonymous readers prepared timely, thorough, and productive comments, saving me from being misheard. At Columbia University Press, Philip Leventhal has been a judicious and genial editor, guiding me to the

xiv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

most significant points and ably shepherding the project along. There I also thank Monique Briones, Zachary Friedman, and Marisa Lastres for their assistance. Paul Saint-Amour and Jessica Berman are the best series editors a writer could imagine. I thank Jessica in particular for going above and beyond, providing insightful and encouraging comments on various drafts. Anita O’Brien expertly and gracefully copyedited the manuscript while practicing social distancing. Thanks to Silvia Benvenuto for preparing the index. All remaining faults are entirely my own. I gratefully acknowledge the vice president for research and innovation and the College of Liberal Arts at UNR for publishing subventions. For teaching releases and research funding, I’m grateful to the following at UNR: the Gender, Race, and Identity program, the Department of English, the College of Liberal Arts (for a CLA Faculty Fellowship and a Scholarly and Creative Activities Grant), and the Fitzgerald family for their gift to the Core Humanities program. Parts of chapters 2 and 3 have been previously published in different forms: “ ‘Only Connecting’: E. M. Forster, Empire Broadcasting, and the Ethics of Distance,” JML: The Journal of Modern Literature 34, no.  3 (Spring 2011): 87–105; and “An ‘Impatient Modernist’: Mulk Raj Anand at the BBC” Modernist Cultures 10, no. 1 (Spring 2015): 83–98. I thank Indiana University Press and Edinburgh University Press for permission to include portions of these articles here. BBC copyright content is reproduced courtesy of the British Broadcasting Corporation. All rights reserved. Special thanks to Samantha Blake and all BBC archivists for their warm welcome on multiple occasions over the years, including during a period of major refurbishment. In characteristic BBC style, all at the Written Archives Centre are completely unflappable. I’m also grateful to the librarians and archivists at the British Library, The Archive of British Publishing and Printing at the University of Reading, the Unity Theatre Archives at the Victoria & Albert Museum, Temple University, and the University of Nevada, Reno. Finally, I thank Maud and Casey for sharing a home with me as I finished this book. Casey knows the joys and frustrations of writing; but for her love, support, encouragement, laughter, singing, drumming, and solicitude, all this would have been impossible.

RADIO EMPIRE

INTRODUCTION

Mulk Raj Anand’s The Big Heart (1945) is one of many novels that wrestle with the effects of foreign broadcasts in India. The antagonist, Satyapal, listens to Azad Hind radio, a station created and run by the Germans to influence Indians against the British war effort. The heroes of the novel, on the other hand, preach cooperation with the Allies and the gospels of democracy and trade unionism. This latter group of characters echo many of the propaganda points of the Eastern Service of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), no coincidence given that Anand worked there when he wrote the novel. The poet, Purun Singh Bhagat, reminds the other characters that the English are “the friends of the peoples” of Russia and China, and that the English are “on the side of truth against falsehood,” extending the BBC’s reputation for veracity to the English people generally.1 Bhagat later reflects that though he “had not done anything to provoke war, he bore some responsibility for the fact that a child in London should be mutilated by a bomb splinter,” thus internalizing British propaganda stressing that the war affected everyone throughout the empire, even if the Blitz felt remote from many in India.2 But while Satyapal listens religiously to Azad Hind, the other characters are not portrayed as BBC listeners. Instead, the novel presents the BBC worldview through the character of Bhagat—rather than include BBC broadcasts, it absorbs their messages for retransmission in a

2 INTRODUCTION

FIGURE 0.1. Mulk Raj Anand broadcasting on the BBC Eastern Service in 1942. Copyright © BBC.

print medium. In other words, the novel does not require a radio playing the BBC in the diegetic realm because one of its characters has already repurposed its messages throughout. Beyond the absorption of BBC content, however, the novel also transposes formal elements from broadcasts: Bhagat makes these arguments in a discussion staged for the novel’s readers that borrows the format of one of Anand’s radio programs. In this doubled sense, The Big Heart is a continuation of Anand’s radio work, not a break from it.3 Of course the two media forms of novel and radio coexisted, overlapping historically. Many radio commentators were also novelists (and vice versa). But over and above depicting the presence of

3 INTRODUCTION

shortwave radio in 1940s India and reworking some of its content, The Big Heart tries on a formal level to compete with it. This competition included the novel’s appropriation of shortwave broadcasting’s temporal immediacy and spatial linking (London feels close to Bhagat) as well as its polyphony (Bhagat’s concern for London is counterbalanced by characters less favorable to the British, who cite the massacre at Jallianwalla Bagh).4 Further, working in radio pushed Anand to develop an aesthetic of speed, one that tempered his interest in modernism with commitments to realism and topicality. Movements back and forth from print to broadcast, England to India, and author to reader had a distorting effect on texts, not only amplifying their upper harmonics but also shifting their fundamental tones. This more complicated process of give-and-take between shortwave broadcasting and literature is the subject of this book. Anand gave a lot of thought to the print/broadcast relationship not only in this novel but in his broadcasts as well. Interviewing the novelist Inez Holden, Anand tied her recent novel on factory life, Night Shift (1941), to a broader discussion of the relationship between politics and aesthetics, calling specifically for more working-class writing.5 In that the broadcast features an interview with a civilian turned war worker, it follows Eastern Service propaganda directives. But when Holden points out that during the war writers “have to write a manifesto, propaganda or something of this sort,” the interview is at least double-voiced: fulfilling propaganda mandates while also drawing attention to its own limitations.6 As Anand realized, the Eastern Service served as a new version of the literary periodical: it offered listeners book reviews and author biographies in addition to interviews. At the same time, the on-air periodical shifts the form. It was issued more frequently than a print periodical, was received almost instantaneously thousands of miles away, and offered cues unimaginable in print forms: the intonation, pacing, and accent of authors not least among them. To take advantage of this connection while highlighting the unique possibilities of the broadcast medium, Anand organized a multipart broadcast program explicitly modeled on the modernist little magazine. Voice, which broadcast poetry and literary criticism, also occasioned reflections on the relationship between the print and broadcast word. As the example of Anand attests—in combination with the others surveyed in the coming pages—literature and radio are subject to a significantly more complex process of negotiation than their mere facing implies. Media

4 INTRODUCTION

historians refer to this state of affairs as intermediality, pointing to the “mutual inextricability” of “print and nonprint media,” of how media forms mutually influence one another, not only in their formal qualities but also in their social use.7 Building on work in a robust but still young field, I argue that if the larger pattern of the mutual imbrication of broadcasting and literature has been underappreciated, this is especially true in the context of shortwave radio to India. This book turns to the decades of the 1930s and 1940s, when shortwave transmission was still a new technology and its use not yet settled.8 The book is drawn to these moments of transition because they reveal in sharper relief the social forces that affect the use of technology. These decades were occupied by a battle between opposing visions of British identity: from a group of loyal colonies eager to defend the motherland (as the Ministry of Information had it) to a looser network of Englishspeaking peoples seeking more equitable relations. While the technology of shortwave broadcasting was imagined as a continuation of previous cultural patterns, its extension over vast distances and interest for those seeking to reimagine British culture meant that shortwave had in the eyes of the Colonial Office at best a mixed result. Anand’s messy entanglement with the BBC’s Eastern Service is shared by many other twentieth-century writers. James Joyce, E. M. Forster, Venu Chitale, and Attia Hosain were all eager to place work with the BBC, with significant impacts on their writing, on broadcasting and its publics, and on British and Indian culture. Rarely considered together, these writers nonetheless shared microphones, studio space, and audiences. Just as significantly, they worked toward an uneasy balance between the propaganda imperatives and technical requirements of the service and their own political and aesthetic commitments. At times these writers’ interests overlapped with the service’s priorities, for instance when stressing transnational friendships. At others, the writers’ anti-imperial politics clashed with messaging on the Eastern Service. Working for the BBC provided remuneration in the austere war years as well as a means of adapting and promoting their writing over the air. But rather than take a sociological or institutional approach to these formative relations among writers at the BBC, this book engages in practices of critical bibliography in order to recover the dynamic exchanges between broadcast and print as both circulated between metropole and colony.

5 INTRODUCTION

Uncovered in this turn to the shifting sands of the literary programming on the Eastern Service is a host of experiments, only some of which were taken up in later periods and on other services. In particular, this book argues that the Eastern Service was the site of mediation in two distinct areas. On the one hand, this book traces the transposition of some of radio’s formal features into the novel: its particular structuring of polylogue in James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (1939) and its management of intimate and more capacious soundscapes in Venu Chitale’s In Transit (1950). At the same time, it also argues that this period witnesses the use of radio as an unprecedentedly fast and nearly global periodical. Diffusing discussions of literary works via shortwave radio reinforces the emergent sense that various global locations exist in the same historical present, even as economic and political unevenness persists. Building on existing accounts of the remediation of poems, plays, and short stories, I turn to the novel to show how deeply radio penetrated the literary world. On the face of it, the novel could rightly be considered the least radiogenic genre: poetry, drama, and the short story can all be broadcast in their entirety, whereas novels seldom are. Yet by limiting consideration to other genres, scholars have underappreciated the extent to which radio and literature interacted.9 While these other genres have traditionally been understood as closer to radio, it’s nonetheless true that the novel did not escape the reach of radio transmissions. Picking up these subtler waves of influence will require something like the “tolvtubular high fidelity daildialler” described in Finnegans Wake.10 The social and generic distance between radio and the novel means that their mutual impacts echo less loudly than they do in other genres. For novelists, repurposing their work for radio urged a reconsideration of form. This exchange went beyond the reuse of content to include conceptions of the sonic sphere as well as the relationship between broadcast and print. For instance, Allan Hepburn and Emily Bloom have linked the soundscapes of Elizabeth Bowen’s novels to her work in broadcasting.11 Bowen’s late novels bear radiogenic traces in their treatment of sound and in their insistence on the continued relevance of print, though one haunted by the immediacy of the broadcast medium. Whereas Bowen found broadcasting broadly congenial, writers in the 1930s were less sanguine. Through a consideration of the relationship between the sonic realm and oracular

6 INTRODUCTION

voice in three novels published in 1938 (Edward Upward’s Journey to the Border, Rex Warner’s The Professor, and C. Day Lewis’s Starting Point), Debra Rae Cohen finds that “the disturbing monoglossic power of the apparatus, seemingly impossible to ignore, rival, or subvert, thus became for leftist writers the ironic target of formal appropriation, and radio—its physicality, impact, and ideological structure—the key metaphor by which to render the problems of the contemporary situation.”12 The BBC’s efforts to create a more homogenous nation through broadcasting met a satirical response in these novels, which took up the “monoglossic” voice only to expose its politics and mock its pretensions, even as the novels themselves employed a monoglossic voice. Cohen’s essay contributes to wider efforts to bring radio to bear on more nuanced understandings of the mediascape of the modernist period, and her attention to the transposition of radiogenic qualities into the novel is a crucial starting point for the readings that follow. But this book’s focus on international broadcasting shifts the field into which the broadcasts entered. For instance, concerns about the monopoly status of the BBC are attenuated in the international context, where the BBC enjoyed a position of power but not a monopoly. Instead the BBC was forced to compete with rival (particularly German) broadcasts and a national service, All India Radio (AIR), which took a range of positions in relation to the BBC, from extensive cooperation to a disdainful tolerance.13 As a result, Anand’s deployment of radio in The Big Heart is more ambivalent than in earlier novels; radio is similarly appropriated by a leftist writer (Anand), but inserted into a crowded field its effects are drawn with greater nuance. Given this pattern of medial give-and-take, I draw in this book from the concept of a media ecology to stress the simultaneous coexistence of media forms. Rather than effect a sudden, decisive break in the discourse network, as Friedrich Kittler has it, people use new technologies like shortwave radio over time to redefine the boundaries of both older and newer media forms.14 Among other technologies whose protocols shaped the implementation of shortwave transmission was that of medium-wave, used domestically by the BBC since 1922. Raymond Williams describes this latter kind of technological coexistence, coupled with that of wider social and political context: “Virtually all technical study and experiment are undertaken within already existing social relations and cultural forms, typically for purposes that are already in general foreseen.”15 Rather than replacing medium waves, shortwaves coexisted with them for decades, helping to trouble the narrative of

7 INTRODUCTION

the forward march of technology. The same can be said of the novel. If media scholars lean too hard on the Darwinian connotations of media ecology, as a struggle for survival in which newer media attempt to kill off their predecessors, they are liable to miss how “in many cases apparently competing media may strengthen or reinforce one another.”16 Bertolt Brecht, for instance, complained in the 1930s that radio was merely parasitic on preexisting media forms. To survive, a parasite must keep its host alive. Brecht is correct to observe that radio is imitative, but as his metaphor implies, radio fails to completely overlap with or displace existing forms. In fact, far from killing them off, it could paradoxically popularize them and also highlight some of their unique qualities. As Brecht’s complaint suggests, newer media like radio often “refashion older media,” but at the same time, “older media refashion themselves to answer the challenges of new media.”17 This process, what Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin call remediation, is a useful way to understand the processes undergirding the state of intermediality. Bolter and Grusin focus on digital “new media,” arguing for a teleological account of media development and succumbing to a level of media determinism that I avoid in this book. But their account of the twin logics of immediacy and hypermediacy central to remediation is one that I adopt here: “If the logic of immediacy leads one either to erase or to render automatic the act of representation, the logic of hypermediacy acknowledges multiple acts of representation and makes them visible.”18 In other words, even as BBC sound engineers strove for an air of immediacy, attempting to aid listeners in forgetting that they were listening to a radio, broadcasters like E. M. Forster often called attention to the fact that they were speaking into a microphone, ostensibly dismantling the air of transparency. Further, Forster in particular broadcast primarily about books; even when he did not call attention to his location in a studio, he described one medium (print) over another (broadcast), thus making audible “multiple acts of representation.” That many of these broadcasts about books were then reprinted in the Listener and his own books continues this process of negotiating immediacy and hypermediacy. Hypermediacy, a demonstration of medial self-consciousness, is characteristic of modernism, though by no means limited to it. The “thoughtfulness, reflection, and self-examination” following on the introduction of new media, David Thorburn and Henry Jenkins argue, take “the form of a reassessment of established media forms, whose basic elements may now

8 INTRODUCTION

achieve a new visibility.”19 This latter point is vital to what I argue in this book: not only does the novel find its way on to the radio, but in its very adaptation certain long-standing features protrude like never before. The novel does not become radio. In its length, its materiality, its investment in the bourgeois individual over society at large, the novel is not entirely susceptible to remediation, thus ensuring its continued existence. Applying this insight to modernist literature, Julian Murphet argues for a “dialectic of convergence-differentiation,” a model that would simultaneously recognize that “literature ‘intelligently and opportunistically’ poaches technical and material properties from [o]ther arts” (and vice versa), while simultaneously “the imperative of autonomization” leads “increasingly to an adamant insistence” on medium specificity.20 Even as radio and print rob each other’s formal qualities, the elements resistant to this pilfering visibly calcify. Finnegans Wake incorporates radio terms and a radiogenic form, but it simultaneously calls attention to itself as a book. Given this focused interest, my use of the concept of “media convergence” differs from that often deployed in the study of digital media (for instance, the combination of newspaper, television, and internet on a smartphone) as well as in institutional analyses attuned to increasing “industry conglomeration and concentration,” or the blurring of lines “between previously separate business activities.”21 Over and above “the flow of content across multiple media platforms,” in this book I use media convergence to point to a necessarily incomplete borrowing of content, formal features, and social contexts from one medium to another.22 For the writers surveyed in this book, radio’s staging of the temporal relationship between metropole and colony inspires a renewed claim to historical contemporaneity, while its formal features suggest a way to render the relationship between individual and society through management of the soundscape. While much of this book explores writers’ enchantment with the broadcast medium and their various attempts to transpose radiogenic elements into the novel, I also uncover how the career of Attia Hosain, who left broadcasting to turn to the novel, underscores the simultaneous force of media differentiation. Even as Hosain used her position as a broadcaster to discuss some of the issues she faced in attempting to translate Indian experiences into an English novel, she also increasingly threw her lot in with the novel precisely because of its longer history detailing the “process of the problematic individual’s journeying towards” herself.23

9 INTRODUCTION

To recover the vestiges of these flows and blockages, this book draws on methods and insights from bibliography and periodical studies. Using these tools, we can better appreciate how these texts morphed over time, whether in the course of their initial writing (as in Joyce and Chitale) or in their various public appearances (as in Hosain, Forster, and Anand). In addition to avant-textes (an author’s preprint materials, which I consider most extensively in the case of James Joyce), this book broadly examines paratextual elements, those items that in Gérard Genette’s formulation “surround” and “extend” the text.24 The epitext, for instance, comprises elements like reviews or author interviews—forms that affect a text’s reception but that are not physically bound with a text.25 Yet at any moment epitext could become paratext: interviews might be appended to scholarly editions of works, for instance, and hearing an author interview influences a reader’s interpretation. While I therefore investigate broadcast and print texts throughout this book, I also seek to expand our account of how shortwave radio alters “the ways and means of the paratext,” which “change continually, depending on period, culture, genre, author, work, and edition.”26 The movement of texts into and out of the broadcast medium has an impact on all these considerations, framing our understanding of remediation. The expanded sense of the text proposed by Genette maps onto (without entirely overlapping with) periodical studies and book history, two of the influential means of historicizing modernism. Periodical studies shares the interest in multiple presentations of texts, authors, interviews, and so on but grounds this study in the scrutiny of the physical coordinates of the page and the creation and distribution networks of periodicals. The physical coordinates of the page—what Jerome McGann calls “bibliographic codes”—clearly do not translate over the air.27 Yet analysis along these lines has been central to the scholarship on modernist periodicals. In an influential reading, David Bennett proposes that “the experience of discontinuity which typifies periodical reading” is precisely that demanded by modernist texts, which users read “not from cover to cover, but ‘spatially,’ affirming the same freedom to dip in, to skip, to cross-refer—unconstrained by the logic of temporal succession—that the reader of the magazine enjoys.”28 Taking the spatial metaphor to further heights, Suzanne Churchill reads the little magazine Others by the lights of its “spatial and architectural tropes.”29 The intangibility of the broadcast medium, however, suggests a way to soften the initially hard distinction between spatial and

10 INTRODUCTION

temporal form. In this book I attend more carefully to the temporal sequence of the broadcast periodical, which—pace Bennett—still allows for listeners to “dip in, to skip, to cross-refer,” and thus one way to expand the archive and reinvigorate the study of modernist periodicals. If the physical coordinates of the page are lost in the remediation of the periodical, many of what Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker refer to as “periodical codes” survive intact: “periodicity of publication . . . networks of distribution and sales, modes of financial support, payment practices towards contributors, editorial arrangements,” and “type of material published.”30 As this list begins to indicate, while periodical studies has coexisted with modernist studies for some time now, attention to “bibliographic codes” alone has far from exhausted the field. A recent instantiation focused on “networks of distribution” speaks centrally to the concerns of this book. Extending earlier work by Robert Scholes, Mark Morrisson, and Donal Harris, Eric Bulson brings the transnational turn to bear on periodicals. For Bulson, not only did little magazines carry “texts safely into the port of the Western canon,” together they also “worked within and against an emerging literary network that was truly global in scope and scale.” In attending to the form of the little magazine itself, over and against its modernist content, Bulson provides a model for the global connections between writers and readers, but, just as important, one that does not form a global totality or world magazine no matter what its aspirations: “The medium was too bound up with local, regional, and national contexts and print cultures, which were, in turn, defined within and against international and transnational processes.”31 Rather than read Eastern Service programs like Voice or E. M. Forster’s book reviews as global forms, I attend to the historical and geographic contexts in which they appeared. The Eastern Service contributed to what we now call the global Anglophone novel, but it did so in a network of imperial communications. But whereas Bulson derives his sense of media specificity by focusing on print (with the notable exception of a chapter on F. T. Marinetti’s use of wireless), I here follow media studies in more extensively tracing the process of remediation, particularly the use of print to respond in some ways to the challenges posed by the use of radio. More so than Philip Gaskell, who shares Bulson’s focus on material texts, I follow D. F. McKenzie’s call for a “sociology of texts,” one that in tracing “all forms of texts, not merely books,” expands the remit of critical bibliography to consider audio.32 Even

11 INTRODUCTION

under the broader umbrella of the sociology of texts, however, the supposed immateriality of radio has stalled the necessary conversation between radio studies and book history. The unusually literary nature of the Eastern Service, to which I turn now, provides an opening into what I hope will be a longer and deeper investigation into shortwave’s role in the circulation of texts. THE EASTERN SERVICE

The Eastern Service began humbly, broadcasting a ten-minute daily news update in Hindustani starting on May 11, 1940, and adding English programs shortly thereafter. Both the personnel and programming were significantly beefed up during the war, and quickly. Supplementing the earlier English-language Empire Service, which started officially on December 19, 1932 (and which I discuss in more detail in chapter 1), the BBC expanded foreign-language offerings in order to counter fascist broadcasts: the Arabic Service on January 3, 1938, Latin American Service in March 1938, and the Eastern Service in 1940.33 From 103 staff members in 1939, the overseas services employed 1,472 in 1941; the total BBC staff topped 10,000 by December 1941.34 Paralleling the rise in staff were the number of languages offered; the Eastern Service added Tamil in May 1941, Bengali in October 1941, Marathi and Gujarati in March 1942, and Sinhalese by spring 1943 to the longer-standing English and Hindustani transmissions.35 Though the BBC did not broadcast programs to India until 1940, controlling broadcasting there was long a dream of John Reith, the BBC’s first director-general, who considered going himself to set it up. Instead, Reith sent Lionel Fielden, who had worked under Hilda Matheson in the early instantiation of the Talks Department. Fielden passed the Reithian vision onto All India Radio (AIR), as well as the aesthetic of the talk genre as developed by Matheson (though to Reith’s consternation the BBC never took control of AIR’s programming).36 Faced with hundreds of candidates for jobs at AIR, the newly arrived Fielden heeded the advice of his friend E. M. Forster and hired Ahmed S. Bokhari, who had studied at Cambridge and taught English literature at Government College, Lahore. Bokhari went on to replace Fielden during the war, serving as director-general of AIR in Delhi from 1939 to 1947.37 As the Forster connection implies, Fielden was never the prototypical imperialist: he counted the Congress leaders

12 INTRODUCTION

Gandhi, Nehru, and Sarojini Naidu as friends and—though on excellent terms with the viceroy—snubbed the vast majority of the British administrators in India.38 While still in India, Fielden advised the BBC that the Empire Service should stop replaying bland programming from the Home Service and instead “concentrate on giving the world the best of England’s writers, poets, musicians, engineers, actors, playwrights, philosophers, etc. This surely is the best propaganda that any nation could do for itself.”39 This vision of the Empire Service was crucial to the formation of the Eastern Service, as was Fielden himself. When it was clear that the BBC should address India directly, following the declaration of war and the creation of a German propaganda service in Indian languages, the viceroy asked Fielden whether he would “go to organize it.”40 The BBC, however, wanted Sir Malcolm Darling, so Fielden agreed to join as editor under Darling. Zulfiqar Ali Bokhari, director of the Delhi AIR station and Ahmed Bokhari’s brother, was also hired by the BBC, taking up the new post of program organizer and living with Fielden in London throughout the war.41 Fielden quit after only a few months, discouraged that his “rude and lively” programming was overturned in favor of Darling’s vision of a “courteous and non-committal” service.42 Although Darling fought against Bokhari gaining any power when Fielden left, ultimately Darling was put in charge of Hindustani broadcasts, leaving Bokhari in charge of the English ones.43 Both soon worked under Eastern Service director L. F. Rushbrook Williams, appointed September 29, 1941, who came to the BBC from the Ministry of Information (MOI) and before that was a history professor in India.44 Much of the staffing tumult in the early days settled as the war went on, but the key outcome was that an Indian was in charge of English-language programming on the Eastern Service, and that Bokhari continued the high cultural vision of the early Talks Department under Matheson and Fielden. Given wartime restrictions, the Eastern Service was subject to various levels of censorship. Rushbrook Williams, in charge of ensuring compliance with the MOI, met with representatives from the MOI, the India Office, and the School of Oriental Studies every other week; the government of India sent cables just as frequently, maintaining “a constant stream of suggestion, criticism and advice.” 45 To be safe, all programs were scripted in advance and checked by Bokhari for compliance. In addition, “there was a ‘censor key’ in every studio suite, and a censor was present at every transmission,

13 INTRODUCTION

though the occasions on which he used his key seem to have been extremely rare.” 46 In fact, as Asa Briggs claims: “Although the Ministry of Information had an Empire Division and was expected to maintain close liaison with the BBC, particularly with the Empire News Editor, the Ministry exercised far less control over Empire broadcasting than over broadcasts to Europe.” 47 The censorship at the Eastern Service was predominantly selfcensorship: contributors stuck to general propaganda guidelines, and compliance was checked internally by Bokhari rather than by the MOI. The government of India urged the creation of BBC broadcasts to India in part because German broadcasts offered a mix of cultural programming and nationalist invective, but also because Indians were felt to be indifferent to the war. One memo to the BBC explained that “Indian opinion is not altogether sure of the grim necessity of the war, and a considerable section of it has doubts about its justice.”48 Reporting from India, Laurence Brander made it clear that listeners there sought “solid British cultural fare”: It was the best antidote to the German tactics of broadcasting high-quality classical music with the aim of giving the lie to the claims that the Nazis were uncivilized barbarians. The Germans, it was said, had some success in this way; listeners had been switching over to Zeesen after the BBC news, and German propaganda to India had been making much of the low cultural level of broadcasting expected by the average British listener in India. The special English programme to India amounting to forty-five minutes a day and produced by Bokhari under the Eastern Service Director, Professor Rushbrook Williams, offered the obvious outlet for what Brander called “the very best all-English product,” “sensible, cultivated, gracious and interesting.” 49

Bokhari argued successfully that the only hope for propaganda to India was if it was subtle, leftist in character, and delivered by writers known to be sympathetic to the anti-imperialist movement.50 George Orwell, who was hired to assist Bokhari in 1941, explains: “Most of our broadcasters are Indian left-wing intellectuals, from Liberals to Trotskyists, some of them bitterly anti-British. They don’t do it to ‘fox the Indian masses’ but because they know what a Fascist victory would mean to the chances of India’s independence.”51 As I unfold in more detail in the following chapters, these broadcasters walked a difficult line, sure of the antifascist cause but far less sanguine about Britain’s past and future treatment of India.

14 INTRODUCTION

The English-language programs on the BBC’s Eastern Service were of a serious intellectual bent, aimed not at the Indian masses nor British officials but at university students and the native elite. As one English writer complained at the time, “the best literary talks are not all on the Home Service. Many are on the Eastern Service, audible to Indians but not to us.”52 A contributing factor to this narrow audience was the expansion of the General Overseas Service, which provided a global service catering to British expatriates and colonial officials, allowing the Eastern Service to focus exclusively on an Indian audience.53 The colonies, “seen as being quite different” from the Empire Service’s core audience in the “ ‘white settler dominions’ of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa,” were only later tended to, as Simon Potter points out.54 From its humble and belated start in 1940 through a rapid buildup in the early years of the Second World War, the English-language programming on the BBC’s Eastern Service was the site of rich experiments in the writing and presentation of literature. Bokhari and Orwell were joined by literary heavyweights like Forster and T. S. Eliot, who—together with an impressive list of Indian contributors (R. K. Narayan, Ahmed Ali, M. J. Tambimuttu, and G. V. Desani among them)—created an international vision of literary exchange. The intellectual bent of the Eastern Service derived not from pure enthusiasm for cultural exchange but from the wartime need to counter German and Japanese propaganda to India, as well as the reality that few listeners had access to shortwave radios. As Gauri Viswanathan cautions, “even the most inclusionary curriculum can itself be part of the process of control.”55 Subhas Bose, after escaping arrest in Bengal and making his way to Berlin, was given “high-powered radio facilities to beam daily broadcasts to India in several languages urging his countrymen to rise in revolt against British tyranny.”56 Orwell thus imagined the Eastern Service’s audience as both “hostile . . . unapproachable by anything that could be described as British propaganda” and small: “a few thousand listeners at the most, and this gave us an excuse to be more ‘highbrow’ than is generally possible on the air.”57 Further, given the difficulty of presenting the need to fight fascism to a country that was itself wrestling to escape from British domination, the choice to focus on cultural ties over a shared political history was not an accidental one. Bokhari’s initial publicity plan calls for an emphasis on “the freedom of India, examples of good treatment of Indians by British, British culture, and Poetry and Philosophy.”58

15 INTRODUCTION

The literary work broadcast by the Eastern Service was therefore propaganda. In mapping the remediation of literary discussion over shortwave, Radio Empire links the supposedly apolitical nature of literature to the interests—no matter how consistently or loudly disavowed—of the agents who placed these items in the overall flow of programming. But whereas Mark Wollaeger suggests that modernism and propaganda coexisted in a contact zone “defined at one extreme by aesthetic subjectivity construed as an unsullied sanctuary for being, and at the other by propaganda as an encompassing array of manipulative discourses,” on the Eastern Service it was precisely the debates over “aesthetic subjectivity” that helped constitute one of the “manipulative discourses.”59 Although Wollaeger troubles the long-standing and dubious distinction between the two poles, nonetheless the two sides precede (and therefore survive within) his analysis of the many ways they intersect in the modernist period. We might instead read the ties between aesthetic debate and the Eastern Service’s “social, economic, and material realities” as undermining “modernism’s ‘subjectivist’ claims to ‘negate’ or escape from its historical relations.”60 Given the historical and institutional conditions under which these discussions unfolded, I find Damien Keane’s more cautious model of “literary, medial, and political relations as they inform one another” better suited to the context of the Eastern Service. Attuned to the “simultaneous overabundance and scarcity” of information, Keane argues: “Rather than define information as a thing or quantity available prior to or beyond its use, it is crucial to recognize this practical work of formally organizing and structuring units or items for their access. This recognition in turn locates access not as a value-free condition, but as the function of administration and control.” 61 To work past some of the resistance expected from the audience, the BBC hired many writers with well-known anti-imperialist stances, including Orwell, Forster, and Anand. While these writers worked to undermine the centrifugal model of culture of the earlier Empire Service, it is also true that, as Babli Sinha points out, “the BBC broadcasts to South Asia were conceptually narrow in order to disseminate the vision of an open, pluralistic imperial centre and to erase realities of famine, oppression, and anti-imperial activity in the Raj.”62 It is imperative to attend to the wartime context of the Eastern Service’s broadcasts, with all the political limitations that this implies. At the same time, it would be both erroneous and condescending to present the writers at the Eastern Service as merely dupes of the British Empire

16 INTRODUCTION

or their work as isolated from larger cultural currents. Instead, what I unpack in the pages to follow is a series of fraught negotiations between politics and aesthetics, Britain and India, print and broadcast, as well as competing narrative constructions of temporality. Though early BBC administrators deployed a historicist understanding of colonial temporality (that the colonies existed in an earlier stage of historical development than England, that they were politically, socially, and economically “backward” in time), I argue in this book that writers on the Eastern Service used it as a platform to challenge and dismantle this way of thinking, intervening in and disrupting how people understood their relationship to time. This shift is reflected on both sides of the supposed temporal divide: writers from the center began to see colonized writers as existing in the same present moment, and colonized writers (for whom this shift was less difficult) encoded this same understanding in their works. In this sense, I see the cultural programming on the Eastern Service anticipating the critique of Hegelian historicism forwarded by Arjun Appadurai, Dipesh Chakrabarty, and Dilip Gaonkar.63 Yet, as Jed Esty points out: “The spatial turn, with its ongoing call for methods that recognize cultural difference and alternative modernity by the hygiene of geographical rather than historiographical inquiry . . . risks turning comparative analysis into an exotic catalogue of pure differences and it risks an inadequate historical reckoning with the facts and legacies of European/Western power.”64 According to this critique, the proliferation of alternative modernities presents two major problems. One (less widely realized) is that attention to cultural difference will not only impede comparative work but also reinforce problematic notions of ethnic distinctiveness. The second, and more troubling in my mind, is an inability or unwillingness to see larger structures of oppression. While the diffusionist model is inadequate in accounting for cultural exchange, it does explain uneven development. Appadurai reminds us that there are many kinds of disjunctive flows, not just cultural ones, and though overthrowing the idea that some cultures are inferior or belated is salutary, if applied too broadly a fractal model can also mask economic, social, and political imbalances. In other words, while Hegelian historicism should be overturned because it denies the reality that the globe lives in a shared present, this should not then create the impression that structural inequality has vanished. Esty’s proposal that there should be a middle ground between countless alternate

17 INTRODUCTION

modernities and a singular modernity is one that the present study engages by delineating the ways that a central institution—the BBC’s Eastern Service—figured in the particular negotiation between Britain and India in the late imperial era. The various agents who make use of the BBC benefit from its work to further economic imbalance, but as Eastern Service broadcasters reveal, culture does not simply mirror these patterns, even if it is not entirely free of them either. An intermedial irony is at work here: if the Eastern Service was used to reinforce the narrative of a global present tense, this is clear only in retrospect because of the mediating force of print. The prime location in which to trace the interlocking patterns of culture accelerated by the Eastern Service is therefore in later print publication. As Michael Warner notes, a public is instantiated not only in a given moment but also through time (and remediation): “A text, to have a public, must continue to circulate through time, and because this can only be confirmed through an intertextual environment of citation and implication, all publics are intertextual, even intergeneric.” 65 For instance, in an interview on Radio 3 in 2016, the novelist Zadie Smith cited E. M. Forster’s Eastern Service broadcasts as a model for her own activism: “Think of Forster in this very building during the war, a man of such quiet temperament suddenly finding himself giving basically political speeches.” 66 This seemingly casual remark helps us locate the echoes of the Eastern Service in a much longer historical frame. For Smith, the BBC is not simply another means to spread awareness of her work, nor merely a public cultural institution mediating between authors and readers. Over and above these things, the BBC offers a way into literary history. Smith’s reference to Forster points to a deep engagement with his broadcasts, the subject of a lengthy review essay she published in 2008.67 That Smith encountered Forster’s broadcasts not as a listener but as a reader is telling. Smith’s focus on Forster helps underscore one of my central claims: that while the Eastern Service has been something of an afterthought in histories of the BBC, its literary programming and employment of colonial writers has had an outsize influence on British literary culture. Listeners are often cast as the elusive golden tickets in audience research and radio studies alike (as readers are for book historians) and go a long way in correcting the myopic perspectives of administrators, who—at least in the BBC’s first decade—largely assumed their programs enlightened the public. But while listeners are important to the narrative I unfold here

18 INTRODUCTION

(a lack of them, for instance, led to Orwell’s resignation), I want to make a counterintuitive claim that the legacy of the Eastern Service is not exclusively in its listening publics but also in its reading ones and in the literatures to which it gave rise.68 As I will demonstrate in the pages that follow, the Eastern Service advertised literary works and authors, published books, and supported writers who refracted their broadcasting experiences into their novels.69 Though there were relatively few Indian listeners, the Eastern Service nonetheless played a substantial role in the literary field, one whose effects are still being felt. In narrowing my study to the BBC’s shortwave services in English (the Eastern Service alone broadcast news bulletins in seven languages), I seek to expand the prehistory of what the academy now calls global Anglophone literature. As Nasia Anam points out, this redesignation of postcolonial studies has emerged through market forces, rather than scholarly debate.70 A recent issue of Interventions on the topic gathers a number of scholars who, like me, have been hailed in the field without being explicitly trained in it. Nonetheless, the contributors note that there are a number of prefigurations of the field, such as Commonwealth literature and—later— postcolonial literature, and institutions (from colonial schools to the publishing world) that prepared the way for this new field’s emergence. While I share the fear that this may be a version of postcolonial criticism less attuned to politics, I am also hopeful that the field designation’s emphasis on the spoken will be salutary, an opening to sound studies. Akshya Saxena, for instance, argues that the renomination of the field “highlights the sounds and speakers of English. . . . Locating English and its speakers in the world offers an opportunity to trace their relations with precisely the multilingual literary and media cultures that the hegemony of metropolitan literary English threatens to subsume.”71 At the same time, I hope that this book’s emphasis on the British Empire’s investment in marketing the idea of global Anglophone literature will help highlight its long-standing service to hegemony, connecting its recent neoliberal iteration with the previous imperial one. As Smith’s comment suggests, the works and writers promoted by the Eastern Service are still being read. The same is true of writers on other colonial services, but none more so than the Caribbean Service. Many writers from the long-standing literary program Caribbean Voices were increasingly hailed as the century progressed, and precisely for their

19 INTRODUCTION

“universal” value: Nobel laureates V. S. Naipaul and Derek Walcott both got their start on the program. Alongside them were Edward Kamau Brathwaite, C. L. R. James, George Lamming, Louise Bennett, and even a young Stuart Hall. Sam Selvon claimed that Caribbean Voices was “the greatest thing that ever happened” to him.72 Brathwaite remembers Caribbean Voices as “the single most important literary catalyst for Caribbean creative and critical writing in English.”73 Yet a limitation of the fact that the Caribbean service has received the lion’s share of attention is that it has become a kind of shorthand for empire radio tout court. Peter Kalliney’s Commonwealth of Letters includes an astute chapter on Caribbean Voices, but the cover of his book features a picture of the Eastern Service, suggesting—even if unintentionally—that the various empire services are analogous.74 But whereas the black Atlantic writers on the Caribbean service “were the twentieth century’s most eloquent and committed defenders of aesthetic autonomy,” the writers on the Eastern Service in contrast engaged politics much more directly, explicitly questioning literature’s autonomy.75 Both services were equally beholden to imperial restrictions, but the nature of these restrictions varied, resulting in widely varying aesthetic effects on the writing produced around them. The most striking divergence between the two services was in the use of the vernacular. Whereas the strength of editor Henry Swanzy’s vision meant that Caribbean Voices encouraged vernacular writing, there was no comparable house style on the Eastern Service—the English-language programming on the Eastern Service was noticeably more catholic in taste. Populated with writers who used the program as a launch pad to international renown, Caribbean Voices was also full of contradictions. In Glyne Griffith’s magisterial history of the program, these include Swanzy’s undermining—by preferring regional speech—the federalist identity that the program was supposed to foster, as well as the balancing act required by “the cultural conservatism of some members of the region’s intelligentsia,” on the one hand, and the prejudice of some of his BBC superiors “that any culture at the periphery could only derive from the colonial center,” on the other.76 While the story of Caribbean Voices is a rich one, it often returns to the issue of the vernacular: The presentation of literature, that is to say, short stories, poems, and, on occasion, drama over the radio meant that the region’s distinctive and distinguishing oral

20 INTRODUCTION

traditions were pressed into the service of the literary by means of audio broadcast. The written and the spoken word were conjoined by radio technology to offer up artistic representations of regional culture and environment to Caribbean peoples. . . . As Caribbean intellectuals such as Lamming, Selvon, and others from the various colonial territories traveled to London, they were of particular interest to Swanzy not only because they were aspiring writers . . . but also because . . . of their accented voices. . . . Swanzy’s call for “local color” had the effect of making writers in the region pay closer attention to the representation of vernacular speech on the page.77

Griffith is rightly concerned here with Swanzy’s interest in harnessing the unique qualities of radio as a sound medium. The writers Swanzy cultivated both wrote in “vernacular speech” and read the work of their peers in accented voices over the air. As Brathwaite cautions: “The noise that it makes is part of the meaning, and if you ignore the noise (or what you would think of as noise, shall I say) then you lose part of the meaning.”78 Radio is not a transparent medium, one that simply transmits preexisting work on the page, but rather one that presents the work differently and also shapes what was written in the first place. But if, as Griffith argues, “here was the Anglophone Caribbean representing itself to itself via the intersecting media of print culture and radio broadcast,” in this book I want to discuss further the relationship between these two media forms, because while the relationship certainly includes the fraught conflict over the use of vernacular, it is not reducible to it.79 If we now see the proliferation of vernacular in literature as a natural end of broadcasting, this was evident only in retrospect, and as one of many ways that literature might interact with radio.80 By returning to these earlier years and wresting the Eastern Service out from under the shadow of Caribbean Voices, we can see that radio’s impact on literature was deeper and stranger than we’ve come to expect. RADIO AND THE CREATION OF INTIMACY

We have now moved beyond the moment in 2002 when Michele Hilmes could claim in good faith that radio was “remarkably unstudied,” a forgotten medium buried under television.81 The past decade has witnessed an explosion in radio studies, from explorations of gender, to listening publics, to the production of radio plays. Within this general reemergence of

21 INTRODUCTION

scholarly interest in radio, a handful of scholars have reanimated the inquiry into the relationship between literature and radio via what the BBC called the Feature. Scholars invested in literary radio have extended the idea of the radiogenic, first deployed by Louis MacNeice and other BBC writers to indicate the distinctive qualities of radio.82 A strong cluster of work therefore centers on the output of the BBC Features Department, which developed an innovative radio genre that was neither radio play nor reportage but instead a combination of “speech, drama, music, location recording and sound effects . . . one that straddled the boundaries of realism and drama, fact and fiction.”83 The Features Department was home to some of the best-known producers, including Lance Sieveking, Laurence Gilliam, and Val Gielgud. But features were produced throughout the BBC, including on the Eastern Service by Venu Chitale, the subject of chapter 4. Louis MacNeice is an example of an established writer who embraced both the poetic and technical aspects of the form (before joining the BBC, he set out to learn “about the knobs” of the mixing console).84 In Ian Whittington’s account, technical study paid off for MacNeice, allowing him to escape the interference of engineers and forge “a new form of art.” Giving shape to the war, “from the early features in the Stones Cry Out series (1941), through his first verse epic, Alexander Nevsky (1941), to the triumphant Christopher Columbus (1942), MacNeice built ever more complex soundscapes in which a listening audience might lose themselves, if only to rediscover a sense of collective purpose.”85 Emily Bloom proposes a less triumphant and more nuanced approach to MacNeice’s intermediality, focusing on the trope of the echo throughout MacNeice’s poetry and broadcasts: “In his writing, echo effects are complicated, nuanced, and constantly changing; their reverberations cannot be neatly summarized through either the rhetoric of a ‘mass media echo chamber’ or a return to the repetitive forms of oral tradition.”86 For both of these critics and a number of others, MacNeice—by embracing the genre of the feature and the technical aspects of broadcasting—has become a touchstone for “radiogenic” writing. In sharp contrast to the more sonically ambitious feature (MacNeice’s Christopher Columbus required forty actors, a symphony orchestra, and two choruses), the talk is a humbler animal, though no less literary. For Lance Sieveking, writing in 1934, the talk is merely an inherited genre, whereas

22 INTRODUCTION

the feature—particularly in its dependence on the “sound effect . . . is the radio of radio.”87 A “stolid genre,” the talk is nonetheless significant, not least in terms of output (talks were broadcast much more frequently than features).88 If we want to get a better sense of radio, we need to supplement the attention paid to the maximalist genre of the feature and reconsider the everyday talk. The danger of dismissing other, supposedly less radiogenic genres is highlighted by David Hendy, who posits that the privileging of features “condemns the vast majority of output as not ‘really’ radio as it should be.”89 In other words, the recent flurry of work on features now threatens to harden from a descriptive into a normative account, actively forgetting radio’s inherited genres. But if the goal is to achieve a more robust account of intermediality, it is precisely these more recognizable genres like the talk that demand our attention. Rather than juxtapose the talk and the feature, however, this book seeks to bring the interest in sound production characteristic of scholarship on features to bear on the talk. Building on this recent scholarship, I here return insights from the study of radiogenic forms to the older genre of the talk. The protocols of the talk call for naturalism. Nonetheless, as Gitelman reminds us, “transparency is always chimerical.” Though the talk appears natural, it has only “become self-evident as the result of social processes, including the habits associated with other, related media”; our focus on the content of the talk derives from a process of forgetting its mediation: “The success of all media depends at some level on inattention or ‘blindness’ to the media technologies themselves (and all of their supporting protocols) in favor of attention to the phenomena, ‘the content,’ that they represent for users’ edification or enjoyment.”90 We can apply lessons from scholarship on radio drama and features to better understand how talk producers created its air of transparency. One central insight is that the talk sits uneasily between an informal dialogue, on the one hand, and the essay and the lecture, on the other. T. S. Eliot, who—as Michael Coyle uncovers—gave more than eighty-three BBC talks, came to insist on the difference between talks and lectures, disallowing the BBC to broadcast a lecture he delivered at the University of Leeds.91 Radio has always coexisted in a complex media ecology with writing; Walter Ong describes the state of affairs as secondary orality—orality that is nonetheless beholden to the organizational structures of print culture.92 But this general point about the protocols of print informing how broadcasters used radio is particularly applicable to the BBC

23 INTRODUCTION

given the decision in the early experimental days to script talks and to imagine an audience of one rather than a crowd. E. M. Forster, the subject of chapter 2, demonstrates how a writer familiar with the genre of the book review managed to direct his broadcast reviews to individual listeners while simultaneously stressing his own idiosyncratic taste, two elements latent in print instantiations of reviews that Forster chose to emphasize in his talks. The scholar to take most seriously the genre of the talk is Todd Avery, whose Radio Modernism (2006) presents a series of case studies from the interwar years to demonstrate the range of possibility afforded by talks, including the significant role of Bloomsbury writers in shaping the genre. John Reith, the first director-general, saw radio as “a means of asserting (or reasserting) a fundamental social unity and common culture through the revival of an atrophied spiritual sensibility.” The reputation of the BBC as a culturally conservative institution, one averse to experimentation or controversy, was the result of conscious choices by Reith. Yet, as the bulk of Avery’s book goes on to unfold, “radio was more unwieldy and less totalizable a technocultural phenomenon than the administration wished it to be.” Desmond MacCarthy, Hilda Matheson, Virginia Woolf, and others in the Bloomsbury circle “saw radio as a potential partner in the advancement of a utopian internationalism,” with their contributions working to “counter the intellectual dimness” of Reith’s vision.93 Despite Hilda Matheson’s resignation from the BBC in 1932, she had perhaps the greatest impact on the genre. In her book on broadcasting, Matheson lays out the talk not as an overheard lecture but rather as a chance for the speaker to directly address each individual listener: Early experiments with broadcast talks showed that it was useless to address the microphone as if it were a public meeting, or even read it essays or leading articles. The person sitting at the other end expected the speaker to address him personally, simply, almost familiarly, as man to man. This led to further experiment. Should broadcasters speak impromptu? How else could this personal spoken speech be maintained? And yet, without a carefully prepared and timed talk, how could a speaker be sure of getting all he needed to say, in its right proportion, into his fixed space of time? . . . Most speakers and certainly most novices need a prepared manuscript if they are to avoid tiresome hesitation or equally tiresome verbosity. A technique had therefore to be found for the writing, rehearsing and delivery of

24 INTRODUCTION

talks, which would avoid the pitfalls of impromptu speech and yet retain its atmosphere.94

I will return to the significance of writing out a talk ahead of time, but right now it’s important to focus on the difficult middle ground struck by the talk genre: neither improvised nor simply read aloud. Though the talk was scripted down to the word, with many speakers further underlining words for emphasis or including other performance notes, it was nonetheless initially conceived, and subsequently delivered, as if it was an “impromptu speech” or extemporaneous discussion. A significant factor in Matheson’s thinking is that an impersonal mode of address (the public meeting) would alienate the listener, who instead expected to be addressed as an individual, even if they were also aware that there were others similarly situated at their radios. As Matheson makes clear, the style of the talk was something arrived at through experimentation and a host of assumptions about the culture of listening. Nonetheless, this decision—to carefully script a seemingly informal talk and practice it just enough to make it appear natural—became the de facto style of delivery for talks during (and after) Matheson’s tenure.95 This had a number of effects on broadcasting. First, it created a model of address that established the relationship between speaker and listener that was decidedly at odds with a lecture insofar as the lecturer performs to an undifferentiated multitude. In a talk, on the other hand, the speaker addresses each listener as an individual, with this intimate pattern of address then replicated through the technology.96 The radio receiver was placed in the domestic realm, not just in the home but often in rooms intended for the family. This difference underlines the  social structures subtending what we think of as radio’s intimate address. As later fascist broadcasts established—by alternately cajoling and haranguing audiences—there is nothing inherently intimate in the technology of radio. Rather, its intimacy stems from social context and careful management of “aesthetic components”; intimacy is a characteristic arrived at only through experimentation and not employed in every situation.97 One effect of Matheson’s particular construction of the talks genre was that it lent itself so readily to Bloomsbury interests and ethics; far from an exclusively interwar state of affairs, these commitments echo well into the period of decolonization. In an explanation of broadcasting echoing

25 INTRODUCTION

Virginia Woolf’s essays on modern fiction, Matheson writes: “Fundamentally it is a harnessing of elemental forces, a capturing of sounds and voices all over the world to which hitherto we have been deaf. It is a means of enlarging the frontiers of human interest and consciousness, of widening personal experience.”98 This connection was not lost on the Woolfs, Desmond MacCarthy, or E. M. Forster. As Avery explains, the “belief in the supreme ethical value of conversation . . . aligns Bloomsbury with Hilda Matheson’s vision for the London Talks Department.”99 Avery’s attention to the talk as a genre and his elaboration of the role of individual broadcasters in reimagining their relationship to listeners makes possible the work essayed in the chapters to follow. But whereas Radio Modernism traces the decidedly internationalist views of H. G. Wells and the Bloomsbury group as they were delivered over domestic radio and into carbon-granule microphones, one of the projects of this book is to follow these commitments in a later period, as their geographic range was extended by shortwave transmitter and frequency range by the ribbon microphone. Less well theorized but equally significant, on the other side of Matheson’s ideology of the talk genre were the microphone, the studio, and the mixing console, the particular uses of which shaped the talk as well. Neil Verma cautions: “Intimate audioposition became so widespread as a tactic that critics have tended to confuse its effects with those of the medium itself. Instead of considering intimacy to be the result of composition choices and volume levels, the radio device has the reputation of being innately intimate.”100 Studio design contributed to this intimacy by acoustically eliminating the sound of the room in which talks were delivered. Talks studios (unlike the BBC concert hall, for instance) “were made acoustically ‘dead’ by covering the walls and ceiling with rock wool applied between battens to the wall surface to a thickness of several inches. The reason for this treatment in talks studios was that the listener’s room would provide all the reverberation needed.”101 In addition to the use of a purpose-built talks studio, the mixing console allowed the engineer to control the overall program volume, the relative volume of each signal, and the amount of artificial reverb added to each. In concert with these choices, the careful selection of a microphone, its placement, and technique employed in addressing it add meaningfully to the overall sound. Paddy Scannell argues that the microphone—though capable of picking up sounds delivered from a distance, as in the earliest

26 INTRODUCTION

days of radio—was also capable of conveying greater nuance when the speaker was closer to it: The microphone transforms the social dynamics between the singer, the song, and the listener, bringing all three closer to each other and thus into a more intimate relation in which the singing voice speaks to an individual rather than bellows at a large audience in a large public space. . . . Close-mike singing is conversational in style (it implicates a you-and-me relationship) . . . what it lacks in vocal range it makes up for in a new range of expressiveness. More pathos, humor, sensuality, and sexiness—in short, more personality and mood—can be projected by the singer  crooning into the mike than the stage performer projecting into the auditorium.102

For Scannell, close-mike singing is received as more intimate than that delivered further from the microphone, and this is just as true for talk. While Scannell’s attention to the mediating effect of the microphone is helpful, I disagree with his contention that “the microphone transforms . . . social dynamics.” It’s more like the other way around. Social dynamics (the desire for intimate address in radio) transformed the use of microphones: from distant objects addressed as if in a hall to intimate objects addressed as if in conversation. The more natural and fuller sound of the ribbon microphone was considered desirable over the older carbon microphones because of this social practice, not vice versa. As even Scannell’s examples make clear, it’s quite possible to record a stage performer with a distant microphone (indeed, this was the practice in early radio). The microphone picks up sound either way; it allows for, but does not demand, the speaker’s or singer’s physical proximity. As broadcasts (and recordings) of classical and jazz music testify, the use of distant microphones is alive and well, determined more by genre conventions than technical requirements. Like the genre of the talk, rock music has generally opted for a close-mic approach that would be considered distasteful in jazz (for instance, listen to the difference between recordings of Mick Fleetwood’s and Art Blakey’s drums). And while close microphones are de rigueur in contemporary radio, the juxtaposition of intimate and distant microphone placement was key to the aesthetic of radio drama in the late 1930s and 1940s. Just as it is misleading to grant a microphone agency, so too is it reductive to talk about “the microphone,” as if there were only one kind.

27 INTRODUCTION

Carbon-granule microphones, which exhibited a narrow frequency range that we now perceive as “lo-fi,” were standard issue in BBC talks studios into the mid-1930s.103 From 1935, however, the iconic BBC microphone widely reproduced in photographs was a ribbon microphone, designed by a member of BBC Engineering as an inexpensive alternative to the RCA model popular in the United States. Whereas a moving coil (dynamic) microphone was used inside Big Ben, and a large diaphragm condenser was used for singing, in talks studios by the late 1930s, BBC engineers favored the ribbon mic for a number of reasons: Before its introduction, all microphones suffered from inferior directional characteristics; sound reflected from the walls was not reproduced with the same “brilliance” as that coming from the front, and this tended to make the acoustic sound “dead.” The ribbon microphone did not exhibit this drawback; its response was double-sided, and it did not respond to sounds coming in at 90° from the axis. This reduced the effect of reverberant sound, and artists could therefore work well away from the microphone.104

In other words, the ribbon microphone exhibits a number of tendencies that distinguish it from other types: it picks up sounds equally from front and back, therefore lending itself to interviews and (as above) to a less reverberant room sound. At the same time, ribbon microphones noticeably attenuate sound on the sides (as one training manual puts it, “the sides of the microphone are virtually ‘dead’ areas”).105 This is useful because papers, wristwatches, and other noise-making devices can be placed next to the microphone without getting picked up. And whereas other styles of microphone accentuate particular frequencies, the ribbon microphone has a famously flat response. The upshot of these characteristics is that the ribbon microphone reproduces sounds in a manner closer to the human ear than moving coil or condenser microphones do. Ribbons are delicate so not suited to every purpose, but in the relatively staid atmosphere of the talks studio they were used to great effect. Elsewhere Scannell is more careful about the role of technology: “Broadcasting reproduces the world as ordinary, but that seeming ordinariness is an effect, the outcome of a multiplicity of small techniques and discursive practices that combine to produce that deeply taken-for-granted sense of familiarity with what is seen and heard.”106 The use of a ribbon mic is precisely the sort of “small technique”

28 INTRODUCTION

that makes the talk seem like a transparent genre. The ribbon microphone— visually iconic from BBC photographs—is in contrast sonically selfeffacing, key to the air of transparency surrounding the genre of the talk.107 Developed in the 1920s and 1930s, the genre of the talk was used extensively in a new media environment in the 1940s, when it was possible to broadcast over far greater distances. If the ribbon microphone and the philosophical underpinnings of the talk genre combined to create a particular  form of what is more generally described as the intimate address of radio, this intimacy was stretched to its limits in the late 1930s and early 1940s. While it is true that radio waves never respected national boundaries, medium-wave (300 to 3000 kHz) and long-wave (30 to 300 kHz) transmissions nonetheless succumbed to obstacles including the requirement of massive amounts of electricity and geographical ones that limited their range. Whereas medium-wave transmitters (used by the BBC to reach their domestic audience) radiate waves horizontally, the later shortwave technology operates on entirely different principles. In contrast to the circular rings of medium wave, shortwave transmissions aim at a specific location, bouncing waves between the ground and the ionosphere, allowing them to work their way past natural obstacles that limited earlier forms of transmission. Whereas medium- and long-wave transmissions radiate out in a circle, then, shortwave is aimed directly at the point of reception, but the advantage of this narrower focus is that it allows great distances to be traversed with far less power consumption. Skipping between the earth and the atmosphere, shortwave saves a lot of power. The directionality needs to be quite precise—an aerial with four stacks offers a tight 18-degree lobe—but the payoff in broadcasting distance is staggering, with “the power gain in the most favourable direction over that of a hypothetical aerial radiating uniformly in all directions” of 185 times. In 1932 the BBC selected Daventry to house their shortwave aerials, and “by September 1939, thirty aerial arrays were available for broadcasting in the shortwave bands,” three of which were dedicated to India. Though the ionosphere was imperfectly understood at the time, engineers knew that the time of day, the seasonal tilt of the planet, and the effects of the eleven-year sunspot cycle all had to be compensated for.108 In the case of the Eastern Service, the Daventry transmitters were often found to be unsatisfactory compared to German and Dutch transmitters, and BBC engineers were sent to India on a regular basis to identify

29 INTRODUCTION

sources of interference, recalculate the number of skips, and determine the ideal angle for transmitting on the same frequency to different Indian cities.109 This meant that it was not only possible but also quite necessary to create programming designed for a specific location. INTERMEDIAL ARCHIVE

As the earlier discussion of the development of the talk genre made clear, though talks were meant to sound like impromptu performances, they were in fact carefully scripted and rehearsed. This is fortunate for scholars interested in the period, because the BBC did not make or preserve audio records of much of its output until after World War II; as Paddy Scannell and David Cardiff observe in their history of British broadcasting: “Although there are recordings of some of the more significant programmes broadcast from the mid-thirties onward, the vast bulk of output perished in the moment of transmission.”110 Nonetheless many scripts were dutifully maintained in their archives. Therefore my interest in intermedial aesthetics derives not only from the period under consideration but from my own historical vantage point as well, one in which I’m forced to consider radio via its written traces. Inspired by a central tenet of media studies, which holds that various media coexist in variously cooperative and competitive relationships, Radio Empire builds a new archive, collating materials from a wide number of sources and juxtaposing a variety of texts and genres rather than simply excavating the BBC archive. I balance my findings in that archive with materials culled from a variety of other sources: personal papers, writers’ notebooks, novels, plays, pamphlets, and so on. Of course, every academic book constructs an archive: we need to gather objects to analyze, no matter what our methodology. But this process of accumulation can be informed by and reify standing models in its field to widely varying degrees (from an insular English nationalism to an exaggerated sense of radio’s autonomy). Here I aim to unsettle the coordinates of each by juxtaposing the BBC archive with the writing of colonial subjects both in and out of the broadcast medium. More than twenty years ago Paul Gilroy pointed to a significant limitation in British cultural studies, media studies, and media history. He could easily have been describing BBC historiography. Gilroy posits: “In these circumstances it is hard not to wonder how much of the recent international

30 INTRODUCTION

enthusiasm for cultural studies is generated by its profound associations with England and ideas of Englishness.” According to Gilroy, cultural studies has often assumed and reinforced a circumscribed vision of the nation. He instead calls for a “critical evaluation of the ways in which notions of ethnicity have been mobilized, often by default rather than design, as part of the distinctive hermeneutics of cultural studies or with the unthinking assumption that cultures always flow into patterns congruent with the borders of essentially homogenous nation states.”111 The problem diagnosed so well by Gilroy persists and has particular resonance in the historiography of the BBC, which has (perhaps unthinkingly) forwarded an ethnically white vision of English culture. Simon Potter explains this tendency by connecting the BBC’s efforts to promote the empire in its domestic programming with the efforts of the empire and overseas services to “link Britons in these islands with a wider British diaspora in the ‘white settler dominions’ of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa.” The colonies, “seen as being quite different” from the dominions, received less attention from the BBC at the time, with the quantity of later scholarship reflecting this pattern.112 Part of the problem, I want to suggest, is an archive problem. Histories of the BBC have largely reproduced an insular image of England held reflexively by BBC administrators. A large contributor to this tendency has been the organization of the BBC WAC, which maintains the organizational structures utilized by committees. Increased attention to programs—not administrative edicts or committee minutes—would therefore allow for a more accurate and nuanced historiography. Recent scholarly interest in archival theory has often followed one of two paths: the first is a broad set of concerns and is exemplified by Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, who trace the relationship between archival base and superstructure. For Derrida, “there is no political power without control of the archive.”113 In Foucault’s broad definition, the archive becomes whatever can be said.114 Both writers urge a careful examination of the flow of power into and out of archives. The second strain is more specific and local, activist and pragmatic. This version seeks to represent the lives and work of marginalized communities; it is well exemplified by (but by no means limited to) the creation, maintenance, and use of queer and feminist archives.115 These two strains in archival theory face in opposite directions: one countenancing the power relationships embedded in and emanating from

31 INTRODUCTION

the archive, the other pulling together orts and fragments from those disempowered by the structures that organize the latter. The two are by no means mutually exclusive, but they don’t always cross-pollinate. But the BBC archive can fruitfully be read from both perspectives. As an initial step in this direction, I’ll here juxtapose two histories—one the official, fivevolume history of the BBC by Asa Briggs (now Baron Briggs), History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom (published between 1961 and 1995); and the second, far less ambitious, a history of radio drama compiled by V. S. Pritchett in 1945, when the medium was only about twenty years old. Certainly the two are incommensurate: one is thirty minutes of audio while the other comprises five bulky volumes. But this is part of my point. The two are based on entirely different sections of the radio archive and offer a radically different take on the BBC, especially its relationship to the outside world. The BBC Archive doesn’t exist. Its constituent parts have been divided and distributed: written archives to a bungalow in Caversham, Reading; photographic archives sold to Getty; and the few audio recordings made before World War II now in the British Library (with still others in the Imperial War Museum). The importance of paper as the (often) sole means of archiving programming is significant. Reith decided early on that recordings would be made only infrequently and would sample a program rather than record the whole thing. (This is why, for example, a recording of Virginia Woolf broadcasting begins halfway through her talk.)116 Given the dearth of audio material from the interwar years, the BBC Written Archive Centre (WAC) has become the de facto archive for modernist radio studies in Britain. But even the WAC is not one thing but rather a set of selfdivisions. The bungalow itself is divided into public and private rooms, and the public rooms are further divided into two sections: one for scripts  and another for personnel files, meeting minutes, internal correspondence, and so on. This architectural divide reproduces and underlines the radically disparate nature of these materials. This division follows one of the tenets of archival theory, what the foundational text in the field (now known simply as the Dutch Manual) calls respet des fonds: basically the maintenance of records in the same order in which they were kept by the organization.117 The BBC maintained a careful record of scripts for government compliance (censorship), for republication of talks in their print outlet, the Listener, and to speed the creation of future

32 INTRODUCTION

programs, rebroadcasts, and so on. In addition, the creation of paper scripts of programs as broadcast was important as a time-saving device: it is much faster to glance through a script than it is to listen to a program.118 Like the collection of scripts, the BBC’s collection of internal memos and documents was also maintained for the immediate and future use of the corporation, but in this case to know how much someone was paid, whether they should be invited back, and how audiences responded to a program. If we look at the WAC through the lens of Hilary Jenkinson’s classic 1922 Manual of Archive Administration, a couple of key concepts are operational here: the archive’s organizational schema has been maintained, there is some space between the role of the archivist and those who use the archive (bona fide researchers and BBC employees), and—finally—the questions of transmission and custody are largely settled, since these records have never left the BBC.119 Reflecting on the process of opening the BBC archive to researchers in the 1970s, Asa Briggs claims to have had a hand in organizing it in a manner that was useful to his own writing, a curious admission by the official historian. This flies in the face of Jenkinson’s distinction between the archivist and the historian. But of course, even Jenkinson’s distinction obscures what often ends up happening in writing—that the archive impresses (without completely determining) the shape that histories take. When writing his history, Briggs heavily favored the second collection— of internal reports, personnel files, and the like— over programs. He admits: For me as a historian of broadcasting (and I am sure that the same would apply to all such historians) my own problem is more one of time. . . . Documentary materials, the kind that in the BBC are filed at Caversham . . . take less time to study and to assess than past television or sound programs. I can examine all the extant files on a large number of subjects: I can only sample television and sound programs, turning back later to associated documents which reveal the origins and the process of that particular program-making.120

That is, Briggs saves time by reading reports and memos about programs and policies, rather than listening to (or reading the scripts of) broadcast programs. The result is an official history that favors officials over history.  Briggs tellingly conflates “substantial written archives” with “the

33 INTRODUCTION

development of the BBC as an institution” later in the same paragraph. Again, part of this stems from the shape of the archive and Briggs’s position in it. The archive is required in the first place when it is no longer possible to remember everything—the archive as a supplement to memory. Any archive’s organizational structure stems from the inability to read and process the whole thing. But by focusing on “the extant files” on a subject, not the programs broadcast, Briggs (perhaps unwittingly) reads from the position of management, not the wide cast of characters who worked as writers, producers, and contributors. As Fielden reflected, having been on both sides of the managerial divide: “You may have all the authorities and restrictions and committees and regulations: but they are all defeated by the rapidity of successive programmes. . . . The men who make the programmes (generally underpaid) sway the crowd: the administrators and authorities (usually overpaid) do not.”121 The extant files Briggs examines condense a vast amount of information into a shorter, manageable form. But by leaning on these same reports, Briggs inherits as well the lens with which they were refracted. My own approach is to reverse the relative volume: to bring the fader up on programs and down on contracts and the like. Briggs’s five volumes helpfully detail the changes to BBC leadership, the conflicting personalities on committees, and the influence of outside, usually government, groups. But Briggs’s history is internalist in two senses: not just internal to the management of the corporation but internal to England as well. The Empire Service, which was central to the creation of the Third Programme, is marginalized, covered in passing, in a single— separate—chapter that focuses on the managers of the service and its initial imagination by Reith.122 (In addition to E. M. Forster’s contributions to the Third, which are frequently acknowledged, fellow Eastern Service broadcaster George Orwell called in 1946 for copying the work of the Indian Service, “setting aside,” in Britain, “one wavelength for uncompromisingly ‘highbrow’ programmes,” precisely the mission of the Third.)123 In Briggs’s work, on the other hand, the creation of the Arabic service is noted, but the majority of its attention is lavished on the dominions. In the third volume, the Eastern Service is neatly disposed of in a few pages. Significantly for my study’s focus on India, Briggs explicitly bemoans the end of empire, drawing a link between his “total history” and the declining fortunes of England in the postcolonial era.124 Drawing on a memo

34 INTRODUCTION

entitled “Empire Listener Research Scheme,” Briggs laments: “The ideal of the great imperial servant relying on radio to strengthen his values and enliven his intelligence clashed sharply with the picture of the Empire listener which can be drawn from this sample. . . . As the wife of a colonial civil servant put it, ‘it is very hot and wet, and light entertainment and interesting talks are all I can be bothered with.’ ” Briggs then opines: “It is not fanciful to trace back some of the later difficulties in the Empire, both during the war and since, to the inability of any agency to change attitudes of this kind. The fact that the BBC . . . tried more than any . . . is to its everlasting credit.”125 The BBC, in this light, was a last defense against the demonizing effects of the tropics and—after the war—a rare source of postimperial pride. (Incidentally, one history of the Third Programme is entitled The Envy of the World.)126 Briggs’s history is then nostalgic for the earlier days of imperial glory, and The Third Programme a consolation for that loss. Much more can be said about Briggs and his relationship to the archive, but allow me to shift attention to a tentative, perhaps laughably incomplete, history that nonetheless has something to offer that’s missing in Briggs but begins to address Gilroy’s critique of cultural studies: an audio history of BBC radio drama by V. S. Pritchett.127 Here programming, not administration, is the focus. In the feature “Modern Radio Drama” (1945), Pritchett builds a sound collage from four exemplary instances of the form (Louis MacNeice’s “Christopher Columbus,” Edward Sackville-West’s “The Rescue,” Patrick Dickinson’s “Theseus and the Minotaur,” and D. G. Bridson’s “The March of the Forty-Five”).128 Easy to overlook, but significant when one engages with the BBC’s wartime literary programming, is the placement of Pritchett’s broadcast in the series Book of Verse, a long-running program aimed at university students in India. In a twist that would make Salman Rushdie’s Whiskey Sisodia smile, this rare history of English radio drama “happened” not in England but in the colonies. Pace Briggs, it was the domestic audience who was considered too fragile for in-depth cultural programming, whereas the Empire Service, and the Eastern Service in particular, was the location of high cultural programming (and thus testing ground for the Third Programme).129 Archives record more than bits of information; they encode specific ways of looking at the world. In the case of the BBC, we run the risk of repeating the insular, nationalist vision of England offered in half of the archive if we fail to return this half to its

35 INTRODUCTION

dialogue with actual broadcast output as well as the literary works developed in and promoted over the BBC. As I argue in what follows, the Eastern Service was by no means a representative example of either overall BBC output or the programming on the BBC’s Empire Service more specifically. And not all the Eastern Service’s work carried over into the later, celebrated period of Caribbean Voices. In its unabashedly high-brow mixture of writers both established and emerging, the Eastern Service was the site of extensive experimentation in fusing the print and broadcast word and marking the contours of each. The work of its writers to remediate literature and radio is evident in the written traces in and out of the official archive. Embracing the challenge presented by the possibilities and limitations of the Eastern Service’s structure, these writers innovated existing forms and shifted the terrain of literary culture away from London even as their broadcast work originated there. FADE UP: ORGANIZATION AND ARGUMENT

Following this introduction, the first chapter is a microcosm of the book, tracing the strange itinerary of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake from its composition in the interwar years to its reception in the postwar period. The BBC figured significantly in both periods: as an inspiration for the novel’s torn syntax, as a target of the novel’s satire of imperial bluster, and then— counterintuitively—as a passionate defender of Joyce’s difficult last book. That Joyce was heard reading Finnegans Wake in India on the eve of Independence propels this chapter, which recovers how radio launched the Wake. Proposing the value of different kinds of intelligibility, broadcasts by T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster, L. A. G. Strong, and James Stephens courted common readers by stressing the musical qualities of the Wake over its investment in myth. The Wake, however, was not simply a passive beneficiary of radio promotion but reflected on the medium’s crisscrossing arguments as well, with Joyce’s notebooks revealing that radio provided a material basis for his conception of the novel’s “polylogue” style. Here we see a striking example of the influence of radio on novelistic form. In addition, by reflecting on conflicts between specific national broadcasting organizations, the Wake provides a window into the cultural dynamics of radio broadcasting during the interwar years. The Wake is a conspicuous instance of media convergence, taking formal cues from broadcast forms, but so too

36 INTRODUCTION

is it representative of divergence: as an object described and promoted over the airwaves. In the second chapter I recount E. M. Forster’s work to promote Indian writers as well as banned literature like Joyce’s Ulysses. The chapter shows that Forster’s modernism was not primarily between the covers of his novels; it was on the radio. Reading Forster’s scripts, I examine the productive years between A Passage to India (1924) and Two Cheers for Democracy (1951), when Forster became an outspoken voice for literature that contested normative values and aesthetics. The humble title of Forster’s monthly, fifteen-minute Some Books program—broadcast over the BBC’s Eastern Service from 1941 to 1947—belies the complex ways in which its content registered and furthered the disjunctive flows of modernism. Forster and his Indian coworkers at the BBC turned what was supposed to be a source of imperial propaganda into an unlikely but vivacious nexus of artistic experimentation and exchange. In his extensive career broadcasting to India, Forster challenged easy distinctions between center and periphery, reviewing works written and published in India as central to the ongoing development of English literature. At the same time, Forster’s efforts to reach his Indian listeners coincided with his work to build a queer archive that tentatively anticipated a future readership. In the third chapter I argue that Mulk Raj Anand’s self-identification in one of his broadcasts as an “impatient modernist,” eager to modernize literature, cities, and social relations but unsatisfied with the pace and nature of the changes around him, posits a link between aesthetic tumult and wider forces of modernization that Anand observed during his tenure at the BBC. Pairing Anand’s unpublished BBC scripts with his novel The Big Heart (1945), I highlight his ability to harness the velocity of broadcast production, transmission, and reception into an aesthetic of speed, revealing his use of intertextuality as a cooperative rather than derivative project. Rather than “make it new,” Anand embraced the mélange of existing texts and genres in broadcasting, forging a role for himself as an imaginative arranger rather than a creative genius. In addition to embodying the critical, revisionist stance of what Helen Tiffin identifies as “canonical counter-discourse,” Anand’s intertextuality allows him to explore modernity as an incomplete project in India and England alike.130 Whereas Forster’s and Anand’s work over the Eastern Service created networks of exchange, Venu Chitale and Attia Hosain prompted a

37 INTRODUCTION

reconsideration of the novel as a radiogenic form. In chapter 4 I trace the significance of the BBC Empire Service to the careers of Chitale and Hosain. Broadcasting throughout the 1940s and 1950s in predominantly women’s programs, the two reveal the importance of this transnational work on literary form. For their male compatriots, such as Anand, radio’s instantaneity helped close temporal gaps between center and periphery, aiding in the process of depicting India as coeval with England. For Chitale and Hosain, on the other hand, the uncomfortable coexistence of disparate temporalities inspired a turn to history as diagnosis and compensatory fantasy. Drawing from both modernism and realism, after Independence Chitale and Hosain turned to a hybrid of the historical novel and the bildungsroman to renew a feminist movement that had been absorbed in the wider Independence struggle, subsumed and largely forgotten in the fight for Mother India. But whereas Chitale draws on her experience writing and producing a feature, transposing some of the formal elements of radio into her novel In Transit (1950), in the context of the intermedial environment Hosain sees the novel’s long-standing investment in bourgeois individuality poking out like never before. If Chitale’s In Transit is an instance of media convergence, Hosain’s Sunlight on a Broken Column (1961) emerges as an example of media differentiation, with its investment in the modernist bildungsroman a critique of the reductive treatment she received at the BBC and in postcolonial India. In a brief epilogue I highlight a number of postwar changes at the BBC and the Eastern Service that made the kinds of work examined in this book less likely to appear on the Eastern Service and more likely to be heard on the Third Programme. Thanks in part to this shift, All India Radio, not the BBC, takes over as the voice of the Anglophone novel on the subcontinent. This shift is registered most forcefully in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981), which continues the intermedial tradition traced in the preceding pages while presenting the protagonist Saleem as sharing the powers of AIR. I then return to Caribbean Voices via Sam Selvon’s work on the program and his novel The Lonely Londoners to rethink their relationship in light of the previous chapters. Like many of the texts discussed in this book, The Lonely Londoners weaves in and out of broadcast and print: it begins as a story read by Selvon over the air, is then published in book form, and later gets adapted as a series of radio plays. By comparing these various versions, we get a better sense of the impact of media form

38 INTRODUCTION

on narrative, a process we can now see working in both directions. Having tracked in the earlier chapters how radio both influences novelistic form and circulates it to larger audiences, creating a new sense of contemporaneity, we can now read The Lonely Londoners in a more nuanced way: as both influenced by radio in its extensive use of a synthetic vernacular and also incorporating aspects from Joyce’s Ulysses that appear only in the print versions of Selvon’s narrative. My reading of Selvon therefore draws on the insights gained from the study of the Eastern Service essayed in the earlier chapters, demonstrating in miniature some of the wider implications of this book.

Chapter One

FINNEGANS WAVES James Joyce Between the BBC and 2RN

Hear! Calls! Everywhair! —JAMES JOYCE, FINNEGANS WAKE

On October 5, 1946, the BBC broadcast the voice of James Joyce reading from Finnegans Wake, but in India, not England. Commencing with this literary-historical curiosity, this chapter unwinds the complex itinerary of this broadcast to reveal a set of longer and deeper connections between the Wake and wireless. Radio inspired the Wake’s dizzying formal experiments, especially its cacophonous polyphony of voices and languages. One of the novel’s central characters, HCE, identifies himself as a BBC broadcaster and echoes interwar radio programming that defended and marketed the imperial project. And in an ironic twist, the Wake, which explicitly parodies the BBC’s empire programming, gets a crucial boost on the Eastern Service. Radio launched Finnegans Wake. Close attention to key moments in the composition and reception of the Wake reveal how radio inspired and then spread what has mistakenly been labeled a great but unread book, a limit-case of the supposed insularity of modernist aesthetics. In the interwar years, Joyce was confined to obsessive listening-in from his Paris apartment, made possible by his construction of a giant antenna on his balcony. Joyce’s love of the medium (especially for its generous provision of vocal music) is countered by an accompanying distaste for the combination of imperial bluster and pedantry offered during the interwar years, not to mention a series of personal rebuffs from BBC administrators. His initial excitement and growing ambivalence are reflected in various

40 F I N N E G A N S WAV E S

stages of the writing of his final book. This chapter tracks radio’s impact on literary form. Unlike the authors who are explored in later chapters, Joyce is not a broadcaster but rather a listener, recording medium, scribe. Refracting interwar politics through a dark glass—what Joyce called “the muddest thick”—the Wake does not have a reputation for accessibility, but it has garnered a good deal of attention.1 Composed of long strings of multilingual portmanteau words arranged in tattered syntax, the Wake poses serious difficulties for readers scanning even a few lines, let alone working to produce an exhaustive interpretation. Such formal features of the novel, coupled with Joyce’s epic ambitions to write a universal book in dream language, have puzzled, frustrated, and infuriated readers and would-be readers alike. Despite challenging conventional interpretive practices, Joyce was passionate about acquiring readers. His fans were eager to help. The 1940s were marked by a number of significant interventions, such as the publication of Joseph Campbell and Henry Morton Robinson’s A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake (1944), a guide to the narrative (plot) of the Wake that aimed to help the “average reader of decent literacy” through a reading of the difficult text.2 The Skeleton Key is but one part (though the best known example) of a larger movement, outlined in this chapter, to popularize the Wake. A fanatic radio listener himself, Joyce was well aware of the promotional value of wireless and tried to organize a number of broadcasts to promote Finnegans Wake. He and his sympathetic commentators used the radio to offer an approach to the Wake that posited different kinds of intelligibility. Joyce attempted to win over neophytes and skeptical friends by reading passages aloud to them, giving an intimate, aural, and oral performance. Radio was ideally suited to replicating and extending these efforts and was used accordingly. Taking up Joyce’s promotional project were four broadcasters: T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster, L. A. G. Strong, and James Stephens, who devoted broadcasts to the discussion of Joyce and the encouragement of ordinary readers in the 1940s. The anti-Joyce literary-critical climate of 1940s England made the choice of an already notoriously difficult book that much more striking. F. R. Leavis, the influential professor of modern literature at Cambridge and editor of Scrutiny, promulgated a negative view of Joyce that was dominant in England and played a part in that country’s failure to produce a single critical book on Joyce in the 1940s. But if the printing press was silent, the  BBC was comparatively boisterous, providing a flourishing site of

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conversation on the Wake. And just as the Wake’s characters and the letters they write travel vast distances, so too did broadcasts about the book.3 Three of the four I examine here were broadcast overseas on the BBC’s Eastern Service, though they had further impact in England as well. For example, Eliot’s talk, republished in the Listener, reached over 100,000 subscribers.4 All four broadcasters used the wireless to launch the Wake, literally sending it into the air, but also setting it up in business, introducing it to new markets. In sharp contrast to nationalist conceptions of culture offered on the radio, these commentators both reveled in the Wake’s polylinguistic structure and held up Joyce’s voluntary exile as a model. Most important, these broadcasts nurtured a transnational body of readers. The Wake was not simply a passive recipient or beneficiary of radio promotion, however. It reflected on the medium’s technical development as well as its crisscrossing arguments and positions. Joyce was not only an enthusiastic listener; he was also an early one. His working notebooks from as soon as 1922 preserve this engagement, with radio providing a material basis for his conception of what he called the novel’s “polylogue” style.5 The early notebooks and the first appearance of Work in Progress (in the transatlantic review in 1924) illustrate how radio was always already an important structuring principle. In addition to echoing the auditory logic of radio, preprint materials reveal that Joyce began a long-standing practice of incorporating technical terms describing the parts, accessories, and audition of radios into the vocabulary of the novel. Thus from its earliest days the Wake’s form is inspired by broadcasting, and its diction derived from a wireless lexicon. This early interest in the technology and emerging protocols of radio is twinned, in the 1930s, with accounts of its use by Ireland and England. Joyce’s revisions to the third chapter of the third book (III.3) disclose an innovative approach beginning in the mid-1930s, when Joyce increasingly incorporates specific references to broadcasting practices by rival nations. During this period, he begins a parallel campaign of writing in which he uses the competition between different national broadcasting channels as part of the narrative of the rise and fall of the father of the Earwicker family (and metonym for imperialists), an Anglican barkeep in Dublin, HCE.6 These two simultaneous processes allow us to see how, on the one hand, Joyce was inspired by the technology of radio to push the limits of narrative cohesion throughout the composition process, with the result that,

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formally, the novel exhibits a number of radiophonic qualities. On the other hand, Joyce references the competition between the BBC and Irish national radio (2RN), tying these observations to the larger themes of empire and cultural and linguistic invasion that resonate throughout the Wake. The Wake, its various prepublication materials, and broadcasts devoted to it constitute a rich archive from which to understand how radio inspired and influenced both the creation of the novel and its subsequent promotion. Restoring the Wake to its conversation with radio provides a window into the cultural and technological dynamics of broadcasting from 1922 to 1947. As I will unpack in the pages that follow, Joyce links the character of HCE to early BBC experiments with empire radio: from the untenable “highpowered station” of long or medium wave, the BBC settled on lowpower shortwave to build its network; these technical debates are captured in HCE’s boasting (557.30). A consideration of early radio further sheds light on the Wake as well, with radio’s discursive structures mirrored in the novel’s polylogue style and contributing to the Wake’s critique of nationalism. Tracing the loop between the Wake and radio exposes a web of conversations in and around the book, revealing a mutual interrogation between the world and the text. Scholars of media studies have tended to overlook the political context of radio in the Wake, and postcolonial readings of late Joyce have missed the radio in their excavation of politics and history.7 By bringing the concerns of these two fields to bear on the Wake, we can see that radio was a prime nexus for the Wake’s critique of both imperialism and the postcolonial state as well as an ironic site for the book’s promotion. To parse how the Wake was launched—both transfixed and hurled—by radio, this chapter begins by recounting Joyce’s obsessive listening practices and his failed attempts to use the airwaves to his advantage. Next I turn to Joyce’s writing from 1922 to 1924 (in early notebooks and the first serial publication of what would eventually be published in book form as the Wake) to show how Joyce shaped his new work’s style on his experience of radio. Later competing national visions offered on English and Irish radio fascinated Joyce, and in the mid-1930s he began incorporating these claims into the existing story of the empire-builder, conqueror, and father, HCE. This use of radio was different in kind from its earlier use (as a way of thinking through the mélange of voices in the Wake). Now it critiqued the fledgling,

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and increasingly conservative, Irish state and the authoritarian, priggish, and imperialist BBC. Despite weaving a critique of Empire Radio throughout the book, Joyce was finally embraced by the BBC. Throughout the 1940s sympathetic writers broadcast appeals to win Indian readers over to the book. These points of contact between the Wake and radio combine to form a narrative not simply of literary production and critical reception but of the ways that wireless contributed to modernism’s transnational commerce of ideas and ideologies, particularly its critical imagining of empire. JOYCEAN ANTENNAE

Keeping the memory of colonization fresh in his mind, Joyce never set foot in independent Ireland, though he was more than willing to lend it an ear. While Joyce’s struggles with his eyes partly explain the appeal of wireless, radio played a much larger role in his life than simply serving as a pleasant distraction—it was his main means of keeping in touch with Ireland. Sean Lester, who met Joyce briefly in 1940, quotes the author’s answer to the question of why he doesn’t return to Ireland as “I am attached to it daily and nightly like an umbilical cord.” The pronoun’s antecedent slips uneasily between Ireland and radio; at this point in Joyce’s life, the two had become almost interchangeable, as becomes increasingly clear as Lester’s diary entry continues: The family, who had gathered by this time, joined in protest, as it was true he kept Radio Eireann going on the wireless all the time. . . . Joyce then began to discuss with [Giorgio] all sorts of details of the daily program; the son was outraged by the quality of opera broadcast. . . . We laughed together over the last “questiontime,” when the three girl typists gave some screamingly funny replies. . . . Then Joyce remarked that one of the competitors, the one who got top-marks on the previous Sunday, when asked who had won such and such a literary prize two years ago, had replied, “I am not sure, but I think it was Joyce”; there were short controversies with the competitor, but he was adjudicated correct. Joyce said that when the Dublin labourer gave this reply, which was correct, he stood up and bowed to the receiver.8

Joyce’s principal link with his birthplace was through his radio, which allowed him to hear the Dublin accent, Irish music (Joyce’s former teacher,

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Vincent O’Brien, was musical director of the Irish station), as well as news, weather, and 2RN’s most popular program, Question Time. Drawing on a combination of memories and research, Joyce wrote Ulysses with unprecedentedly thorough local and historical detail, and he supplemented these sources when writing Finnegans Wake with material he heard on the new medium of radio. Further demonstrating his attachment to the device, in even this short snippet of conversation, Joyce twice anthropomorphizes the radio, by bowing to it and by referring to it as an umbilical cord. If Joyce treats the radio as a body, the fledgling Irish state treated it as vital to the body politic. The birth of the Irish nation was accompanied by investment in wireless. 2RN, controlled by the postmaster general with oversight by the Dáil, was considered a crucial part of state building in newly independent Ireland. Michael Heffernan, the parliamentary secretary, told the Dáil in 1928 that “special prominence is, of course, given in programmes  to the Irish language, Irish history, music and all subjects of importance to the development of the national characteristics of our people.”9 To develop the national character, 2RN complemented the relatively small percentage of Irish-language broadcasts (only 4.2 percent in 1935) by regularly broadcasting Catholic mass, Gaelic games, and programming aimed at the rural agricultural population. Most likely what appealed to Joyce, however, was the predominance of music, which constituted 80 percent of the programming in the 1920s and 67  percent in the 1930s.10 Not everyone, however, considered this to be a good thing, with one editorial from the Evening Herald summarizing the complaints of many: “So far the fare has been poor. There has been more than enough instrumental and vocal items with never a humorous talk, a lecture, or an expert dissertation, or a business chat.”11 Séamus Clandillon, the station director, had such difficulty paying performers that he pulled in whomever he could find in the building to sing a song; his wife was featured so regularly that she earned the nickname “Maighréad Ní On Again.”12 The memoirs of 2RN employees all give the sense that, at least during the interwar years, Radio Éireann was predominantly a source of Irish vocal and instrumental music, making the service a close match to HCE’s inquisitors, the Four, who weave countless songs into their reminiscences on Irish history. In addition to the radio playing an important part in Joyce’s private life, occupying—at least according to this anecdote—much of his day and night, it was also a major player in his public life. That the name “Joyce” became

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the correct answer to a question on a popular program demonstrates how successful and well-known he had become; that the answer was first controversial then adjudicated as correct was also representative of Joyce’s experiences with radio as part of his public persona. At least at first, his treatment on radio mirrored the fate of Ulysses, essentially banned outside of Paris. Sylvia Beach was able to broadcast on Ulysses and Work in Progress on Paris radio in May 1927, but—in sharp contrast—the BBC explicitly banned any mention of Ulysses. Harold Nicolson—the writer, diplomat, and husband of Vita Sackville-West—was to conclude a series of BBC talks on modern literature with Ulysses in November 1931. Instead, it was canceled at the last minute. Only after a public outcry and letter in the Times signed by forty well-known authors and publishers did the BBC relent, and only partially. Nicolson’s broadcast was rescheduled for December, but he was forbidden from referring to Ulysses by name.13 A few years later, in July 1937, Frank O’Connor was scheduled to give a talk on Joyce over Radio Éireann; it too was mysteriously and abruptly canceled.14 These developments hurt Joyce, who was desperate not only for publicity but more precisely for a greater circulation and air of respectability. Alistair McCleery points out that Joyce’s “unstinting efforts towards ‘respectable’ publication by a recognized publisher in London” were motivated in part by the desire to overcome the negative associations of a private printing in Paris, “the source of much of Europe’s pornography.”15 The Nicolson affair became one of many obstacles to T. S. Eliot’s attempts to publish Ulysses with Faber and Faber. A “memorandum of relevant facts” drawn up by Joyce’s legal team on the circulation of Ulysses in England bemoaned: “The BBC censor refused to allow Mr. Harold Nicolson’s lecture discussing ULYSSES over the Radio. Only after three weeks of continual tergiversation and under the threat of Mr.  Nicolson’s resignation did he finally give way with the condition that the title of Ulysses would not be mentioned.”16 Well aware of the book’s uncertain legal status and the vagaries of obscenity prosecutions, Faber demurred; Ulysses was not legally available in the UK until John Lane’s edition in October 1936. Nicolson, who had met Joyce on a trip to Paris in 1922, wrote to Joyce and Beach about his difficulties with the BBC administrators, furthering Joyce’s sense of persecution from the top. Joyce had strong support from Nicolson and Hilda Matheson, the director of talks, but the poet Alfred Noyes held a private luncheon in order to convince John Reith that the talk

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should be censored. Provided Noyes agreed to back the BBC publicly, Reith (always averse to controversy) agreed to cancel the talk himself. Noyes attempted to start a row in the Times, but the plan backfired in that the protest of authors and publishers—in addition to Matheson’s resignation— got much more press. As Todd Avery points out, the censorship of the talk was widely taken as an existential threat to literature: “The signatories were concerned that the BBC . . . had imposed an arbitrary and potentially ‘dangerous’ censorship on literary broadcasts”; another letter in the New Statesman and Nation “argued that Matheson’s resignation amid the Nicolson affair was over ‘primarily a question of freedom.’ ”17 Reith sought to quiet this new controversy by allowing Nicolson’s modified talk. But for Joyce, the plot was more than enough to frustrate his attempts at literary respectability. Despite these difficulties, Joyce remained interested in promoting his work over the radio. Only three years after the Nicolson affair, in 1934, he coached actress Rachel Behrendt in reading sections of his Work in Progress for a party given in his honor by a society figure, the Honorable Mrs. Reginald Fellowes. Joyce’s biographer, Richard Ellmann, records that Joyce attempted to gain a larger hearing for the performance: “He sought to have Rachel Behrendt’s reading recorded by the British Broadcasting Corporation, and Maria Jolas talked at his request to Harley GranvilleBarker about it. But the BBC was not interested.”18 Rebuffed again, Joyce had not entirely given up on the BBC; buoyed by another French broadcast and the book publication of Finnegans Wake, he finally secured interest from the BBC in 1939. Joyce had a hand in Alfred Péron’s broadcast on the Wake over Paris radio; he boasted to Louis Gillet, “Next Thursday, at eleven a.m., M. Alfred Péron will speak about Finnegans Wake on Radio Paris P.T.T. This will be the first voice to break the silence in these parts.”19 Anxious to build on this momentum, Joyce (through Paul Léon and his London literary agent and solicitors) wrote the BBC and finally managed, in July 1939, to get an interested reply from the BBC, who wanted to broadcast Joyce reading from the Wake on the Northern Ireland service. It seemed—at least for a few days—that Joyce’s promotional efforts would finally pay off. Unfortunately he had to cancel his projected trip to London, where he was to record his reading, because of his daughter Lucia’s worsening condition and the increasing probability of war. The BBC proposed possible replacements; Harold Nicolson and Samuel Beckett were both

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considered because of their familiarity with the text. Joyce and Léon wrote to Monroe Saw and Co. that “Samuel Beckett would be willing to do the broadcast for the BBC,” but by this point interest in the project had fizzled in London, and nothing came of the dialogue.20 This was as close as Joyce would come to broadcasting during his lifetime. In addition to promoting his own work and reputation, though, Joyce was also anxious for radio publicity for his son, Giorgio.21 Joyce was often consumed with worry about both of his children and he used radio to both follow and cultivate Giorgio’s singing career.22 Given Joyce’s concerns, it is not surprising that he tuned into his son’s broadcasts and was awed by the virtual sense of presence. During Giorgio’s second trip to the United States, Joyce wrote Lord Carlow: “He sang a few times over Columbia Station during his short stay and, in fact, I had a new wireless set rigged up for the occasion with the aid of an antenna on the balcony made out of one of my many walking sticks—not the ambassadorial Irish blackthorn—and we heard him singing across the ocean as clearly as if he had been in the next room” (L, 3:422–23). Joyce’s experience of the uncanny, disembodied radio voice recalls that of early commentators on wireless, for whom the experience was not unlike a séance; this is a striking example of how radio created a sense of intimacy even over great distances. Joyce’s later comparison of the radio to an umbilical cord becomes less extreme in this context, as the experience of hearing Giorgio across the Atlantic created a significant affective response, connecting parent and child. Despite his own frustrations with the BBC, Joyce was anxious to secure Carlow’s help in setting up an audition for Giorgio, giving Carlow a New York Herald review of one of Giorgio’s broadcasts to pass on to the BBC.23 Joyce’s paternal pride suffered considerably when Giorgio was “failed by the invisible Jury of the BBC,” an experience quite familiar to Joyce (L, 3:450). Writing George Rogers, Joyce fumes: That high court issued its verdict, to wit, that his voice was well below the required standard and that no one saw reason to include his name on their list for some future date. Since Giorgio is so reticent I turn to you. What the deuce did happen at that audition? Did you feel something in the atmosphere, a row, some hostility, haste, unpreparedness, etc. Or stage fright completely destroyed his voice and he  really sang in a way to deserve the offensive sentence. “Below the level of Great Britain in the art of singing!” In the name of St. Cecilia’s heavenly ugola,

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even if my own lion’s roar is half spent, I never expected this donkey’s kick! (L, 3:450–51)

Rogers was unable to comfort Joyce, reporting that Giorgio “sang very well and was grossly undervalued” (L, 3:450n.2). Part of Joyce’s exasperation stemmed from the fear that his own reputation had hurt his son’s prospects, confirming his earlier worry that despite his feelings for his children, he might make things more difficult for them. By referring to the BBC sardonically as a “high court” and appealing to national pride, an unusual move for Joyce, he echoes the Four and invokes a history of English persecution of the Irish. These incidents reveal an author who was fascinated with the technology, using it to keep in touch with his homeland, family, and—he hoped— readers. Benedict Anderson puts forward one way to parse radio and nationalism: that radio accelerates a process performed by books, newspapers, and a vernacular national language.24 What Joyce and radio from the time show, however, is that radio disregarded terrestrial borders even as it cemented cultural ones. As such, radio became a crucial means of working through and performing the role of an ambivalent exile. Joyce can safely soak up these forms of Irish culture and music when he wants to (quite frequently) without the perceived danger of actually living within the physical borders of Ireland. At the same time, he was well aware that broadcasting drastically altered the relationship between authors, publishers, and readers. Joyce’s promotional efforts reveal an interest on his behalf in the common reader that was not often duplicated by his supporters during his lifetime. Given how much radio was on Joyce’s mind, it is no surprise that it enters his writing. But we need to pay close attention to the ways in which he references and uses radio in his work, as this changes with the development of radio in the interwar years. In the beginning, however, it served primarily as an analog to the style of Work in Progress. THE WAKE’S RADIOPHONIC AVANT-TEXTES

Joyce began the composition of the Wake the same year that the BBC began regular broadcasting, and radio figures in significant ways in the first serialized publication of an episode from the Wake in Ford Maddox Ford’s transatlantic review in 1924. Broadcasting presents a new polyphonic style,

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captured in Joyce’s notebooks and in the transatlantic review installment. This episode, nicknamed “Mamalujo” after the four Gospels, implies that the Four—an amalgamation of the four gospelers, the Four Masters (Irish Chroniclers), the four shores of Ireland, and four senile, lecherous men— both broadcast with and listen to wireless as a means of disseminating their views on Irish history and spying on the affair of Tristan and Iseult. This use of radio gives the episode a contemporary setting but more significantly suggests that Work in Progress was as much a listener’s as a reader’s text. Print as an information technology accustoms readers to seek a continuous narrative, but the radiogenics of Work in Progress call for the ability to accommodate a set of serial narratives interrupted and then continued later. In other words, the Wake takes the form of a number of broadcasts that are cut off but subsequently picked up again. Even a small shift in reader expectations can go a long way in making the text clearer. At this early stage, radio was a means for Joyce to think through and frame the syntactical complexity of his story. In addition to the historical coincidence (that Joyce begins Work in Progress the same year that the BBC starts regular broadcasting) and the formal similarities between Work in Progress and early radio reception, however, Joyce’s notebooks help to contextualize his interest in and use of radio. Joyce started collecting material in notebooks for his next work after the publication of Ulysses in 1922. Out of lists of notes came early sketches based on figures from Irish history, “Roderick O’Conor,” “St. Kevin,” “Tristan and Iseult,” and “Mamalujo.”25 In terms of genetic history—or how the Wake was written—the “Tristan and Iseult” and “Mamalujo” episodes were originally composed together, but Joyce subsequently separated the two, completing the last sketch in October 1923 and then revising it for publication in the transatlantic review in April 1924. Joyce liked Ford’s temporary title “Work in Progress,” also used for contributions by Ernest Hemingway and Tristan Tzara, so much that Joyce maintained the title throughout serial publication, even when future installments appeared in other periodicals, including Contact, Criterion, Two Worlds, Le Navire d’Argent, This Quarter, and most extensively—from 1927 to 1938—in transition. The segment published in the transatlantic review is foundational in many ways, featuring portmanteau-laden prose as well as important structural principles and thematic concerns that Joyce would maintain through book publication fifteen years later. The text, for example, includes

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misleading structural elements. Broken into four major parts, one for each Gospel—“Johnny,” “Marcus,” “Lucas,” and “Matt,”—the episode frustrates readers expecting each section to revolve around (or perhaps be narrated by) one of the Four and in neat succession.26 Even a cursory glance at Work in Progress at this stage, not to mention the sketches and drafts that predated it, frustrate the dreams of what Jean-Michel Rabaté calls “the reductive reader who imagines that a first-draft version of Finnegans Wake would be written in ‘normal’ English and would provide a ‘basic text’ from which the reader might produce a continuous narrative or a ‘skeleton key.’ ”27 Instead—though the language would become more demented and riddled with multilingual portmanteaux in subsequent installations—the garbled syntax of “Mamalujo” makes attempts to construct a “continuous narrative” difficult at best. The first print appearance of Work in Progress utilizes frequent interruptions that suggest channel switching as well as the uneasy transitional years when amateur operators coexisted with the BBC. A narrator introduces the segment as well as each subsection, referring periodically to the Four in the third person. This narrative is often interrupted by voices in the first person, but though a colon introduces this device the first time (“they used to be saying grace together right enough: here now we are the four of us”), the signal is an anomaly (215). The remainder of the episode switches person midsentence, as in, “But now that reminds me of the poor Marcus of Lyons and poor Johnny the patrician, and what do you think of the four of us and there they were now listening right enough, the four saltwater widowers,” which switches between a first person who speaks of the Four in the third person and a first-person plural representing the Four directly (217). The already unstable narrative is then subject to further interruptions presented in parentheses—and often employing the language of phone calls—as in, “gallowglasses to find out all the improper colleges (and how do you do, Mr. Dame James? Get out of my way!) and all the horsepowers” (217). Between segments of already garbled syntax, Joyce here inserts further telephonic interruptions, highlighting the transitional state of broadcasting, when its protocols were unsettled enough to borrow from those of telephony more extensively and obviously than in later iterations (though the persistence of the announcement “This is London calling” on empire broadcasts is a notable holdover from these days).

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In addition to echoing the phenomenology of unpredictable radio reception in the 1920s, this segment of Work in Progress is also radiogenic in its tendency to appropriate previous texts and preexisting genres. As Bertolt Brecht points out, “from the beginning the radio imitated practically every existing institution that had anything at all to do with the distribution of speech or song.”28 In other words, a night of broadcasting included drama; popular and classical music; news and weather forecasts; talks on history, literature, economics, physics, international relations—preexisting genres all. Instead of dividing the episode into discrete subsections, the Four point to a number of other texts and, by doing so, demonstrate how the Wake proceeds in part by clustering references rather than through traditional sequential narration. Many of the Wake’s sentences, too, pull from and suggest many different kinds of speech. The episode narrates (and renarrates) the attempts of the Four to make sense of Irish history from the perspective of old age. It comprises a mashup of a retelling of Tristan and Iseult as an Irish genesis story and references to Ulysses, the Bible, the Irish Chronicles, Yeats’s infatuation with Maud Gonne, and Dion Boucicault’s play Arrah-na-Poghue, among many others.29 Joyce’s episode borrows from the narrative of Joseph Bédier’s The Romance of Tristan and Iseult, in which King Mark is turned against the lovers through the jealousy of “four felons at court.”30 In Work in Progress, the four felons and King Mark are combined, but when The Four are depicted spying on the wooing of Tristan and Iseult, their surveillance takes place at least partially through radio, rather than from a tree as in Bédier’s version.31 Thus radio figures prominently in this first published version of Work in Progress, with the Four utilizing radio for both broadcasting and spying. Additionally, the work’s style corresponds with the fragmented reception of early broadcasts. But Joyce’s notebooks help contextualize how thoroughly radio inspired the sketch. His composition process has been described as accretive, with Joyce adding sometimes substantial segments to each successive draft of an episode. He began by keeping notebooks that featured a mixture of quotations from his reading, personal life, and what David Hayman helpfully identifies as “notes on narrative” (JJA, 31:xiv). He then culled phrases and ideas from these notebooks as he wrote and revised drafts, typescripts, and proofs.32 In an early stenographer’s notebook (now dubbed VI.B.10, its catalog number at SUNY Buffalo) which Joyce kept from “approximately

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December 1922 to February 1923,” he made a series of notes related to Ulysses and the Odyssey before compiling notes that would be used for “Roderick O’Connor,” “Tristan and Isolde,” and “HCE.”33 Other notes were more organizational in nature, including a series explicitly pertaining to radio. After “inquisitions/objective fable,” Joyce created a list labeled “stories”: Monologue 1–2 2nn1 2–2 polylogue (broadcasters) (VI.B.10– 37; JJA, 31:97)

The “stories” Joyce is attempting to organize are those told by the Four, and this list presents a series of options, running the gamut from monologue to polylogue, with various permutations in between.34 From this note we can begin to see how radio emerges as an important medium for thinking about the Wake’s structure. Radio, specifically the idea of competing “broadcasters,” provided a basis for Joyce’s experiments with a style of interleaved narratives, interruptions, and general lack of clarity in determining who was saying what in the book. The phrases from the notebook referring to radio were not yet directly incorporated into the text—neither “polylogue” nor “broadcasters” appear in this first instantiation of Work in Progress. But the importance of this preplanning is nonetheless obvious even at this stage, not to mention subsequent drafts, when both terms are incorporated in the Wake.35 For one, the note is expanded on in the version published in the transatlantic review: “But sure that reminds me now, like another tellmastory repeating yourself, how they used to be at the end of it all at that time (up) always, tired and all, over their singing (up) the top of the voice of Mamalujo sitting round two by two, the four confederates” (222). This incarnation of the Four, like the note from the notebook, plays with monologue (“the voice of Mamalujo”) becoming divided “two by two,” and then further separated, “the four confederates.” In fact, the episode as published continues this interest in mapping the permutations of the Four, referring to “the whole twice two four of us” (218) and “(up one up two up one up four)” (221).

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Not only was the Work in Progress conceived as a polylogue, but also casting the Four as “broadcasters” inserts them into a circuit of listening and speaking that updates Bédier’s Tristan & Isolde with a new technological medium. The Four are “the four master waves of Erin,” representing the four provinces but also playing again on radio waves.36 Twice on the first page alone, the Four are described as “listening in,” the term for radio audition. The phrase—later shortened to simply “listening,” as we use it today—was derived from the fact that early amateur users eavesdropped on transmissions not directly addressed to them, a state of affairs that changed when the BBC and 2RN began regular broadcasting with an abstract national (and unintentionally international) audience in mind. Nonetheless, the term was used throughout the interwar years in all aspects of radio literature, and— demonstrating how widespread the use of this term was at the time—in 1923 and again in 1925 the Abbey Theatre staged a one-act play by Sean O’Casey, Cathleen Listens-In, “a satire of contemporary politics employing the radio idiom as a metaphor for eavesdropping.”37 The ambiguity of radio broadcasting characters’ speech and simultaneously spying, or “listening in,” on them is established in the transatlantic review excerpt and then amplified throughout the composition of the Wake. In II.3, which features various pub tales in HCE’s bar, for example, the radio in Earwicker’s pub is described as a “daildialler,” reporting on the work of the Irish Parliament but also perhaps transmitting the conversations of the pub’s customers (309.14). This theme is then expanded in IV.1, a summary and recapitulation of the rest of the book, as Earwicker both broadcasts, “Eireweeker to the wohld bludyn world,” and is slowly awakened as a radio plays in the background (593.3). Much more dramatically, in III.3 the Four interrogate a sleeping Shaun, HCE’s son, by sending and receiving radio transmissions from his prostrate body. In line with the developments of early radio—with amateur operators coexisting, albeit increasingly uncomfortably, with the BBC—what we would consider aspects of telephone conversation mingle with the broadcasts. For example, references to telephone conversations are interwoven with those to radio: “And again they used to give the grandest universal lectures (hello, Hibernia!) . . . (Matt speaking!) . . . (Lucas calling, hold the line!) . . . Johnny Mac Dougal speaking, give me trunks, miss!” (218). In addition to common telephonic phrases like “hold the line,” the reference to trunks invokes “trunk line” or a direct telephonic connection. Yet at the

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same time, “hello, Hibernia” is much more clearly a broadcast, especially in that it is directed not to an individual, but to a country. Roland McHugh glosses “hello, Hibernia!” as a reference to a “BBC radio broadcast to US, 1925: ‘Hello, America!,’ ” but as we see, this couldn’t have been the case because the passage was published in 1924 and drafted even earlier.38 McHugh’s confusion is instructive, however, in that the Four seem to be engaging in “psadatepholomy” or pseudotelephony, a confusing blend of technologies that remains a constant in different versions of the Work in Progress (218).39 As with the telephone, early wireless transmissions were point-to-point operations; the advent of broadcasting to all and sundry, however, did not immediately erase the telephonic protocols of wireless. By attending to the unsettled media protocols of radio, this early version of the Wake captures what Lisa Gitelman identifies as “a vast clutter of normative rules and default conditions, which gather and adhere like a nebulous array around a technological nucleus.”40 It is precisely in the early and transitional stages of a given technology that the protocols surrounding them are exposed as constructions: not yet smoothly incorporated into social practice but rather uncomfortably borrowed from existing technologies. On the one hand, this confusion fits with the workings of the dream state, but it is also a reality of the early days of radio, when amateur and professional stations vied with one another for listeners-in and respectability. The sounds of this transitional state are then deposited in the Wake. Station to station, dream to waking life; and on the formal level we see the fusion of the printed word with radio and telephony. The first print appearance of Work in Progress established a number of characteristic features, including the use of technology to help explain the confusing style. Techniques used in the transatlantic review are magnified in one of the final chapters to be written, II.3, revealing that the Four remain associated with radio, that radio is associated with both broadcasting and listening/spying, and that radio remains a structuring principle used to connect disparate subsections, originally drafted as individual sketches. Critics of the Wake have shown interest in the relationship between radio and technique (Theall and Hayman) or style (Lewty and Connor) or the dreamer (Bishop).41 These studies all map the complex relationship between technology and writing.42 Though seemingly unfamiliar with Joyce’s listening habits and the importance of radio even in Joyce’s earliest sketches, critics have long realized that radio was important in the Wake. As early as

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1944, Campbell and Robinson wrote about II.3, “the radio is blaring and the customers are pushing each other about, swapping yarns.” 43 These critics often base their interpretations around II.3, which is replete with specifically radio interruptions: a weather report (324.24–34), static (314.8–9), a news update (324.35–325.2), an advertisement for a motion picture (330.23–24), an “excerpt from John Whiston’s fiveaxled production, The Coach With The Six Insides” (359.23–24), an announcement for the continuation of “Fearson’s Nightly” (359.27), and “the dewfolded song of the naughtingels” (359.32), among many other programs. It also includes a description of a radio in the diegetic realm, in this case HCE’s pub.44 More recently, James Connor has suggested “the sudden jumps from image to image [in Finnegans Wake] are similar to the jumps on the old wireless from channel to channel.”45 Connor and Jane Lewty point out that poor reception in the 1930s meant that listeners would often hear multiple languages unintentionally, as receivers regularly picked up competing waves; “In those days . . . radio air was full of noises, wandering signals, high altitude skips, and super heterodyne screeches, and anyone who listened to it had to gradually attune themselves to a cacophony of voices all speaking at once.” 46 This cacophony has a clear parallel in the overlapping stories of the pub’s customers in II.3. In words that describe the radio in HCE’s pub equally well, one listener writing to an amateur wireless magazine complained about “a cacophonous miscellany of bestial and obscene noises” emanating from their set.47 That is, reception was often a battle for each individual user; not only would those surfing the waves pick up a miscellany of languages and noises, but those hoping to listen to a particular station would as well. Butt and Taff combine voices at the end of their skit in II.3 to ascribe their experience with poor reception to “magpyre’s babble towers scorching and screeching from the raveindove” (354.27–28). The radio towers are “babble” towers in that it is difficult to make out what they are saying, but this also sounds the Old Testament’s tower of Babel, the destruction of which spread a multitude of languages and confusion around the earth. The confusing sounds emitted by these towers are scorching, which implies that they’re burning and quick but also screeching, producing an unpleasantly loud sound. Both ravens and magpies are traditionally associated with bad luck and are known for their imitative abilities, whereas doves are associated with peace and are often employed in religious iconography as a symbol for the Holy Ghost.

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Furthering the association with death and scorching, magpie is combined with funeral pyre, the wooden structure used for cremation. Here the combination of raven and dove (or perhaps “raven in dove” or “raving dove”) encapsulates in one portmanteau word the complications surrounding the reception of radio. Put differently, the medium carried with it the promise of peace and understanding between people, while it also had a magical aura from the world of superstition, a grating, disturbing sound, and finally, the ability to drown out other voices. In place of a wolf in sheep’s clothing, radio was a raven in dove’s feathers, and both “Mamalujo” in the transatlantic review and II.3 in the Wake stress this point. The Wake, however, has a tendency to spread themes and plots across the entire work, and a more extensive consideration of radio as employed throughout the Wake suggests distinct meanings at different times. By focusing on “Mamalujo” rather than II.3, I show that radio was important to Joyce throughout the composition of the Wake (rather than exclusively late in the text’s history, when wireless was far more common). To limit our understanding of Joyce’s use of radio to the first appearance of Work in Progress and its extrapolation in II.3 is to miss a great deal, however, as these structural uses give way to more social and political uses, joining up with the Wake’s critique of both the British Empire and the new Irish state. Only later, after Ireland had established its own station and radio become increasingly a part of daily life rather than a novelty—specifically in the mid1930s—would Joyce connect the Four with 2RN and HCE with the BBC in order to form one of the clearest clusters of postcolonial statements in the Wake. I therefore read the use of radio in III.3 first, returning to pull new meanings out of the pub scene (II.3) in this chapter’s conclusion. THE KING’S SPEECH: HCE AT THE MICROPHONE

The role and meaning of radio changed in the Wake alongside its technological and social development, reflected in the edits and additions Joyce made in the mid-1930s. David Hayman points out that II.3—a late addition, begun in 1935—is highly radiophonic.48 But Joyce clearly had radio on his mind as he expanded earlier chapters as well, and nowhere is this more noticeable and significant than in III.3. Here the radio references take on specific national characteristics and are a particularly powerful and clear example of how the Wake was engaged in the geopolitics of the interwar

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years, specifically by mapping and critiquing the ways in which broadcasting was used to further nationalism and, in the case of England, empire. Sharing widespread suspicion of foreign influence in Ireland, various characters in the Wake interrogate a Dublin patriarch and publican, HCE, who is accused of exposing himself in a public park and of being a foreigner, a “broadcaster . . . (Hear! Calls! Everywhair!)” (108.22–23), and, more damningly, a BBC announcer, or “Big, big calm announcer” (534.7). Like the BBC, which organized Empire Day broadcasts, speeches from the king, and talks on the empire, HCE stages an elaborate defense of his imperial past. While HCE is associated with British radio, three of his four interrogators are from 2RN, the Irish national broadcasting service, and their most prolonged examination of HCE, in III.3, takes place through a surreal séance composed of broadcast exchanges. Summarizing the trial succinctly, the Wake indicates that the Four “tried old wireless” and “found him guilty of their and those imputations” (557.15–16). HCE is firmly linked with the BBC; when he speaks through Shaun in III.3 to counter the accusations of the Four, he identifies himself as the calming voice of a BBC announcer: “Calm has entered. Big big Calm, announcer” (534.7). More important, HCE’s defense draws from George V’s Christmas broadcast in 1932—written by Rudyard Kipling—a source made clear by HCE’s references to his “invisible friends” (546.29) across his “volted ampire” (549.17).49 HCE’s position, with “everybody connected with him,” is at once a testament to his strength—his ability to build monuments and empires—and also part of his downfall, broadcasting his failed attempt to defend himself (557.35). In this sense, Joyce captures the paradox of national broadcasting. Ostensibly meant to boost the idea of the nation, it also inevitably pulls in the opposite direction, undermining the sense of firm borders. The sketches of what became III.3, begun as early as 1924, initially described the third watch of Shaun, in which he falls asleep and is interrogated in a kind of séance by the Four; eventually Shaun’s voice grows weaker and gives way to that of HCE, who defends himself from accusations of sexual impropriety. This basic plot structure (the interrogation of Shaun leading to that of HCE) remains consistent in its appearance in transition 15 (February  1929) and the second part, which was separated, expanded, and published in a Faber pamphlet in 1930 as Haveth Childers Everywhere. Though separated for Haveth Childers Everywhere, the second

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part (III.3B) was reintegrated into the text for book publication and follows the first (III.3A) without a break in Finnegans Wake. In the version published in transition, the Four conduct an investigation of Shaun but—despite their association with radio in the transatlantic review—largely confine themselves to metaphors related to hypnotism and telephones. Only in 1936, working from the transition proofs, does Joyce restore the sense of the Four as broadcasters and listeners-in, but he does so in a dramatic new way that reflects the realities of the time and the development of 2RN and the BBC. In the earlier transition version from 1929, the representative of Ulster makes a simple complaint that Munster is asking a question out of turn: “Your crackling out of your turn, my Moonster firefly. And sir my queskins first, foxyjack!”50 Returning to this passage in 1936, in a first pass through, Joyce adds between these two sentences: “2 R. N. and Longhorns Connach, stay off my air!” (JJA, 61:84). In addition to differentiating the Four as originating from distinct regions, the Wake now separates them according to competing national broadcasting services. In fact, this and later rounds of revision include the proliferation of Irish radio references. These include a combination of the ancient Irish instrument with its newest technology, “the wireless harps of sweet old Aerial” (JJA, 61:219), a pun on the lonely listener-in and the nickname of the Irish radio service, “I’m athlone in the lilting of Killarnies” (JJA 61:219), a description of a listener-in tuning into foreign songs, “pricking up ears to my phono on the graund and picking up airs from other over the aether” (JJA, 61:220), and a description—likely copied directly from a program guide—of the end of the night’s transmission, “All halt: Sponsor programme and close down” (JJA, 61:249). All these additions reinforce Irish radio’s reputation as nostalgic, traditional, and part of the state’s attempt to link its current existence to the mythic past. Joyce’s next pass through is much less radiocentric, though he adds another reference to the international span of early radio: “In this wireless age any owl rooster can pick up bostoons” (JJA, 61:447).51 Continuing his late addition of radio references, on the galley proofs of the Wake in 1937, Joyce added a new twist on his early polylogue note: “his dream monologue was over, of cause, but his drama parapolylogic had yet to be, affact” (JJA, 62:340), as well as a reference to his favorite 2RN quiz show: “question time drew nighing” (JJA, 62:344). In all these additions, the Wake itself picks up radio signals from 2RN and retransmits them on the printed page.

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After Partition, the BBC and 2RN competed with each other. Joyce thus continued to augment the “crackling out of turn” passage, with the version in Finnegans Wake reading: Dis and dat and dese and dose! Your crackling out of your turn, my Moonster firefly, like always. And 2 R. N. and Longhorns Connacht, stay off my air! You’ve grabbed the capital and you’ve had the lion’s shire since 1542 but there’s all the difference in Ireland between your borderation, my chatty cove, and me. The leinstrel boy to the wall is gone and there’s moreen astoreen for Monn and Conn. (528.27–33)

This Northern Irish speaker complains about Munster and Connacht explicitly, conflating Leinster (the province that includes Dublin) with 2RN, the Irish radio call-sign. Although a large transmitter was built in Athlone, which straddles Leinster and Connacht, most broadcasts originated in Dublin. The division of the Four becomes more obvious with this reference, as Ulster was serviced by the BBC, which transmitted from Belfast. The partition of Ireland returns in another phrase from the Four, “Tune in and pick up the forain counties,” where “counties” replace the expected “countries” as foreign (JJA, 61:238). Whereas the Four could be thought together in earlier centuries, Partition now divides them. There was much mutual suspicion between 2RN and the BBC, particularly as the BBC was free of advertising, whereas 2RN—like most stations on the continent—included limited advertising in order to supplement the income from licenses (hence the sponsor program referenced earlier). Nonetheless, because most employees at 2RN looked with admiration on the BBC, and because the BBC was eager to transmit more Irish music, the two would occasionally collaborate on concert broadcasts. Giving the Ulster character’s paranoia a contemporary grounding, however, cooperation between the two stations was stopped for many years after complaints from Ulster listeners that the BBC inadvertently broadcast an Irish nationalist song specifically calling for the death of the English.52 As Damien Keane reveals, the BBC—enjoying “institutional autonomy”—was often in conflict with Stormont, refusing later requests to rebut news items portraying Ulster in a negative light.53 Although broadcast from within clear geographic borders, once radio waves left their transmitters they often destabilized the very national boundaries that their content was intended to reinforce.

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Attuned to this phenomenon, the Wake extends to radio towers a more general fascination with how building monuments undermines the constructor. If, on the one hand, the radios found in HCE’s homes (Earwicker’s pub and Roderick O’Conor’s castle) are a testament to his power, they also destabilize it. The most condensed version of this larger pattern is when HCE’s “house of the hundred bottles with the radio beamer tower” turns from a means of showcasing his authority into the system that allows his persecutors to find him (380.15–16). For example, it reports on his escape from his trial, attempting to inform others in order to bring him to justice: “Cracklings cricked. A human pest cycling (pist!) and recycling (past!) about the sledgy streets, her he was (pust!) again! Morse nuisance noised. He was loose at large” (99.4–7).54 Similarly, in I.3 HCE’s trial takes place on film, television, and radio, when “Mass Taverner’s at the mike again!” (54.21–22), and in “Mamalujo” the Four use it to spy on HCE as Tristan (383–99). In II.3, though the pub’s customers gifted the radio to HCE, it takes part in the building case against him; only after the radio and television in the pub have broadcast their programs does a mob come for HCE (373–80). The masses, inspired by a broadcast, rise against a symbol of colonial oppression; simultaneously, however, the Wake supplements its radiophonic style with plots centered around interwar colonial broadcasting. Linking HCE with the BBC, the novel deploys a much more thorough character differentiation than in most other sections. HCE is consistently linked with England with some of his more important nicknames, or elaborations, including “High Church of England” (36.29), “He’ll Cheat E’erawan” (46.1), and “everybody connected with him” (557.35). While HCE’s transmission and confession are free from commercial interruptions (like the BBC), the Four stop to advertise the town of Drumcollogher in Limerick County, referencing a song by Irish songwriter Percy French (540.9–12). Even though as the interrogation progresses the Four become increasingly sympathetic to HCE, observing at one point that “He’s not all buum and bully” (550.4), the Four consistently maintain their Irish location, advertising “Steving’s grain” (550.6), a fictional food product playing on Stephen’s Green in Dublin, and giving the Irish shipping news: “The S. S. Padraic’s in the harbour” (550.7).55 The volleys between the Four and HCE are distinguished not simply through nationality but rather through the characteristics of national radio. The most significant cluster of radio references is not in II.3—which, as I indicated earlier, has garnered the most attention from scholars since a

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radio is physically present in the pub—but rather from the culmination of HCE’s many trials in III.3. Unlike in II.3, where the radio only occasionally— and accidentally—slips out of tune with 2RN, in III.3 the interrogation of Yawn and HCE begins by switching back and forth between HCE in the form of the BBC and the Four as 2RN.56 After Yawn recedes into the land and stops speaking to the Four, they have to adjust their reception and ask “whoishe linking in?” (499.35), followed by a slightly premature “Now we’re gettin it. Tune in and pick up the forain counties! Hello!” (500.35–36). The transmissions they receive from Yawn are wide-ranging though typically compact, switching from catchphrases from Parnell and Oscar Wilde to statements from a supposed witness to HCE’s indiscretion in the park who contradicts himself enough to call his testimony into question (501–28), at which point HCE gives his most elaborate defense (532–54). More important, radio serves as one of the means of distributing his selfundermining defense of empire building. HCE’s long-winded and unconsciously self-incriminating defense implicates him as he simultaneously denies indiscretion and admits that he can’t afford to confess to it: “On my verawife I never was nor can afford to be guilty” (532.18–19). Littered with references to cities and empires, this section of the Wake has just as much to do with HCE defending himself against the charges of his indiscretion in the park as it does with defending empire building generally.57 As Rabaté points out, III.3 brings out a Swiftian side of Joyce; HCE’s defense is interrupted by lists taken from B. Seebohm Rowntree’s Poverty: A Study of Town Life (1902) detailing the impoverished houses in the city of York, giving the lie to HCE’s claims to spreading progress and comfort. Showing how his treatment of ALP is representative of larger patterns, HCE reveals the violent nature of his lessons: “with fairskin book and ruling rod, vein of my vergin page, her chastener ever I did learn my little ana countrymouse in alphabeater” (552.36–553.2); elsewhere he boasts, “I am known throughout the world wherever my good Allenglisches Angleslachsen is spoken” (532.9–11). Here the global spread of English is tied directly to the violence of imperialism, even as its purity is itself called into question. Dubious claims to pure origins run rampant in the Wake. The investigator of “the letter,” which here takes the form of a “radiooscillating epiepistle to which . . . we must ceaselessly return,” posits a figure who “got up for the darnall same purpose of reassuring us . . . that the ear of Fionn Earwicker aforetime was the trademark of a broadcaster with wicker local

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jargot for an ace’s patent (Hear! Calls! Everywhair!)” (108.18–25). In other words, part of the defense of HCE was that he was a broadcaster who, despite calling everywhere, used a local argot. As with all the other defenses of HCE, however, this one too carries a double meaning— “wicker” deriving from the Swedish vica, to bend, not to mention a wicket, central to the British game of cricket. In other words, this supposedly localizing feature may actually point to HCE’s foreign roots as well as to his attempt to bend his words to appear more respectable. Reversing the direction of interrogation in III.3, the BBC becomes a major site for the scrutiny of the prostrate body of the Wake. This is all the more significant because, as in the Wake, HCE’s text is subject to scrutiny not in print but instead via transnational broadcast exchanges. That these investigations take place in England and are transmitted to India concretizes the Wake’s suggestion that “In that earopean end meets Ind” (598.15–16). WAKEAN RELAYS

In a now famous tirade in the then increasingly influential journal Scrutiny, “Joyce and the ‘Revolution of the Word,’ ” F. R. Leavis stages his most elaborate case against the inclusion of Joyce in his canon of English modernism. For Leavis, Ulysses is full of “inorganic elaborations and pedantries” and, worse, Work in Progress is “not worth the labour of reading.”58 Consumers in England and America disagreed. In a time of paper rationing and tight budgets, the Wake sold briskly, with at least twenty-one thousand copies printed to keep up with demand in the 1940s alone.59 Leavis insisted, however, that in contrast to D. H. Lawrence’s rich links to the land, England’s pastoral history, and romanticism, Joyce’s methods were mechanical: “When one adds that speech in the old order was a popularly cultivated art, that people talked . . . instead of reading or listening to the wireless, it becomes plain that the promise of regeneration by American slang, popular city-idiom or the inventions of transition-cosmopolitans is a flimsy consolation for our loss.” 60 Leavis here conflates Joyce, transition, and the wireless as equally decadent, modern phenomena. He intended the comparison with wireless as an insult, of course, but his remarks were prescient in that after transition ceased publication, the radio became a major site of Wakean commentary. The radio afterlife of the Wake strikes a middle ground between Leavis’s antagonism and the adulation of the

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transition editors and, most important, constitutes one of the earliest and most sustained efforts to court the common reader to tackle the Wake. Leavis’s firm stance against Joyce was so influential that Joseph Brooker, in his useful history of Joyce criticism, uses Leavis to explain Joyce’s neglect in England in the 1940s, arguing that Leavis “deported him,” and pointing out that England did not produce a single book on Joyce for the entire decade of the 1940s. Instead, the version of modernism that caught on was one that Leavis described as “the age of D. H. Lawrence and T. S. Eliot.”61 Though Brooker is right to note that Joyce was welcomed in America while largely forgotten in England, Brooker’s focus on the monograph leads him to overlook a burgeoning area of Joyce criticism and popularization—the radio. If England was slow to produce books on Joyce, there was a comparatively lively debate occurring on Leavis’s hated wireless, specifically over the BBC. These discussions may have been easy to miss because, as Salman Rushdie’s character Sisodia declares in The Satanic Verses, “The trouble with the Engenglish is that their hiss hiss history happened overseas, so they dodo don’t know what it means.”62 That is, the discussions of Joyce may have taken place in studios in London, but they were generally broadcast on the more intellectual Indian service. If the Home Service was slow to bounce back from Nicolson’s aborted broadcast on Ulysses, the Eastern Service was a flourishing site of conversation, featuring discussions of Joyce by T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster, and L. A. G. Strong. To appreciate the contribution made by these broadcasts, it is helpful to recall the polarized positions taken by many in regard to the Wake, the broad outlines of which can be represented by the differences between Leavis and Eugene Jolas. Leavis’s article plays on the title of one of Jolas’s earliest, most notorious, and programmatic manifestos in transition, “Revolution of the Word” (1929), which contained twelve prescriptive and provocative statements like “The revolution in the English language is an accomplished fact,” “The Literary creator has the right to disintegrate the primal matter of words imposed on him by textbooks and dictionaries,” “The writer expresses. He does not communicate,” and “The plain reader be damned.” 63 Transition was often taken to be synonymous with Joyce; Marcel Brion expressed a commonly held view when he referred to the journal as “la maison de Joyce.” 64 Jolas and Elliot Paul adjusted the publication of transition based around the availability of sections of Work in Progress. When Joyce did not have a new installment ready, he would arrange for the

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inclusion of supportive articles, like Beckett’s essay “Dante . . . Bruno. Vico. . Joyce.” Like Frank Budgen and Stuart Gilbert, who had an outsize influence on the reception of Ulysses, Jolas set the stage for readers of Work in Progress. Though many subsequent critics of the Wake seized on Jolas’s language, including Nicolson, the fact that Joyce was not among the twelve signatories should discourage the conflation of Jolas’s goals and aims and those of Joyce himself. Nonetheless, Leavis reacted as much, if not more, against Jolas’s essay published in An Exagmination (1929), “The Revolution of Language and James Joyce,” than against the actual Work in Progress. In Jolas’s essay he declares: “When the beginnings of this new age are seen in perspective, it will be found that the disintegration of words, and their subsequent reconstruction on other planes, constitute some of the most important acts of our epoch.” Complaining about the prevalence of banal, “worn-out verbal patterns” and coupling this with a belief that culture and language in the twentieth century were becoming increasingly universal, Jolas argues that the new parameters of modern life require new relationships between words.65 Though this process is best exemplified by Joyce, Jolas invokes a host of writers who also employ neologisms in their work: Léon-Paul Fargue, André Breton, Gertrude Stein, and August Stramm. Yet Joyce is said to have developed his system on his own, and the statement that most irked Leavis is Jolas’s comparison between Shakespeare and Joyce: “In developing his medium to the fullest, Mr. Joyce is after all doing only what Shakespeare has done in his later plays, such as The Winter’s Tale and Cymbeline, where the playwright obviously embarked on new word sensations before reaching that haven of peacefulness mirrored in the final benediction speech from the latter play which closes the strife of tongues in Ulysses.”66 As noted above, Leavis finds Joyce’s formal innovations and nods to the Bard a poor substitute for what Leavis posits as a more organic, agrarian past. Yet while these two critics disagree so strongly about the value of Joyce, they largely limit themselves to a formalist consideration, and both agree that the Wake is not for the common reader, an assumption challenged by writers on the BBC. To supplement discussions of the Wake’s form, these broadcasters stressed the musical nature of the novel and argued for the legitimacy of an affective response to the text. Even though none of Joyce’s schemes to broadcast came to fruition, broadcasts on Joyce are almost as old as the medium itself, with Sylvia Beach

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giving a talk in Paris for the Institut Radiophonique D’Extension Universitaire on May 24, 1927. Joyce, in Switzerland on vacation, was unable to find a radio to listen in to the broadcast.67 The lecture is primarily concerned with the founding of the Shakespeare and Co. bookstore at the suggestion of Adrienne Monnier, its support from the French literary establishment including Valery Larbaud, André Gide, and Paul Valéry, and its cultivation of American writers. The centerpiece of the broadcast, however, is a triumphant, rosy account of the publication and reception in France of Ulysses: In James Joyce’s book life is expressed with perfect frankness, as for example, in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. So the Editress of the Little Review, Miss Margaret Anderson, was brought up for trial, and condemned for publishing an immoral book. . . . The importance of this work in our literature is so great, and its suppression in America was of such universal interest that as soon as a complete edition in Paris was announced, letters enquiring about it came pouring in from all over the world . . . and, as everyone knows, [it] was a tremendous success.

Beach points to the importance of France not only in the publication of the novel but in its reception as well, with Larbaud’s essay in the Nouvelle Revue Française identified as “the first article on Ulysses.” Beach’s broadcast, seemingly the first on Joyce, maintained the tradition. Though the broadcast focuses on Ulysses, Beach ends her talk by advertising transition, and in so doing, the work around which it was edited and released, Joyce’s Work in Progress: “A new point of contact between French and Americans is the review, ‘Transition,’ recently founded here by Mr.  Eugene Jolas and Mr. Elliott Paul, both Americans.” 68 Beach’s talk is generally upbeat, concerned with the benefits of French and American cooperation, but she also provides important context in that, though in its ninth edition, Ulysses was still banned in the United States and England. The period when the sale of Ulysses was illegal, and any mention of it over the BBC strictly banned, gave way—only after Joyce’s death—to a more accommodating era. Stephen Spender’s obituary for Joyce, published in the Listener on January 23, 1941, just ten days after Joyce’s death, signals a major departure for the BBC from the interwar years, when the mere mention of Ulysses was strictly proscribed. Discussion of Joyce was finally permitted by the BBC, but Spender takes pains to stress Joyce’s propriety, noting: “As some critics have attempted to portray him as a pornographist, a story in

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connection with this is amusing. [Sylvia Beach] said to me: ‘If ever you speak to Joyce, for goodness sake don’t say anything improper to him. There’s nothing he hates more than that. He blushes like a girl at an improper word.’ ” This was necessary restorative work, but Spender is more concerned with Joyce’s future readership. Though technically an obituary for Joyce, Spender’s essay devotes more space to the discussion of Finnegans Wake than all Joyce’s other works combined. The obituary, like Beach’s broadcast, casts Joyce in a heroic—though apolitical—light; Spender presents him as the last “representative of the European tradition of the artist who carries on with his creative work unaffected by the storm which breaks around him.” For Spender, the Wake is valuable for literature in that it moves beyond the limits of stream of consciousness, including its extreme subjectivity. In its place, the totalizing and universalizing gestures of the Wake create a new language that is “the beginning of a universal language.” Speculating that Joyce’s works “may lie unread, except by scholars,” Spender makes a forceful argument for their relevance to the common reader, “They undermine our picture of life by pointing out that our conception of individuals is only a tiny approximation of the truth. . . . At the same time, his books enormously enhance the value of life by making us realize how every single individual is deeply connected with the past.”69 This argument is a noticeable and significant departure from Jolas and Leavis, who stressed Joyce’s novelty. Ending by quoting from ALP’s closing monologue in the Wake, Spender stresses precisely this connection with the past. Aimed at the common reader, radio lectures on Joyce were universally encouraging, with T. S. Eliot’s talk “The Approach to James Joyce” (October 1943) acknowledging the difficulty of Joyce’s work but urging readers to develop a tolerance for discomfort. Simply put, Eliot’s “approach” is to read Joyce’s works in the order in which they were published. On the one hand, Eliot’s talk could be disheartening; he posits, “Even to give you some notion of the style of the writing would take more time than I dispose of today. To explain how to read it would have a dozen talks; and I don’t think that I myself am yet qualified to give them.” Eliot discourages any approach but a systematic, chronological one, and even that system leaves him feeling unprepared to explain how to read Joyce’s final novel. Yet the struggle is ultimately worthwhile, with Eliot simultaneously signaling its greatness: “I will say only that I believe [Finnegans Wake] to be at least as good as Ulysses, and that is a great book indeed.” Joyce, he adds, is “one of the great

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writers, not of our own time only, but of all European literature.”70 Ever alert to the benefits of intellectual struggle, Eliot argues that learning to persevere in a state of confusion is both necessary and rewarding. Eliot’s reluctance to “explain” the Wake is not false modesty. Central to any reckoning with Eliot’s on-air statements is his understanding of the genre of the talk. Working within the tradition established by Matheson, Eliot presented himself as a passionate reader rather than an expert. As Michael Coyle puts it: “The opportunity to reach a popular audience attracted Eliot, and he didn’t want to lose it by coming across as Professor Dryasdust. . . . In his concern to establish a conversational tone, he was thinking clearly of the differences between a broadcast ‘talk’ and a public lecture.”71 In the case of Eliot’s statements on the Wake, this meant that Eliot laid bare his struggle to understand the work, though he published a section of Work in Progress in the Criterion in 1925 and managed to see it through book form at Faber. Eliot was the only member of the “Men of 1914” not to break with Joyce—Ezra Pound considered the Wake a waste of Joyce’s talent, and Wyndham Lewis attacked Joyce at length in Time and Western Man (1927). Eliot’s broadcast is one of his few public statements on Joyce and is a striking contrast to “Ulysses, Order, and Myth” (1923). Whereas the earlier essay proposed the “mythical method” as “a way of controlling, of giving a shape and a significance to the vast panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history,” the broadcast downplays the Homeric correspondences as one detail among many.72 In place of the mythical method, Eliot proposes that Joyce’s method was profoundly personal: His portrait of himself was at the same time a portrait of universal adolescence. This was his method. His was an intensely egocentric personality. He did not compose a novel through direct interest in, and sympathy with, other human beings, but by enlarging his own consciousness so as to include them. In his next book he did create a great character, Leopold Bloom, for whom Ulysses is a symbol. But he did this by introducing himself—the same Stephen Daedelus who is the hero of the Portrait—and he creates Bloom as a counterpart, an opposite to himself.73

This shift in focus, from the mythical to the personal, partially explains Eliot’s surprising investment in recounting Joyce’s biography as a means to understand his work. Four years before his essay on Ulysses appeared, Eliot had

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declared, “Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality.”74 Yet—perhaps because of Eliot’s friendship with Joyce or Joyce’s recent death (in addition to the rhetorical requirements of the talk genre)—the broadcast is nothing if not biographical criticism, starting with the first sentence: “James Joyce was born in Dublin in 1882.”75 Eliot’s discussion of Portrait is a blend of the biographical mode of criticism he had been using and partially a recapitulation of Pound’s take on the novel, which posited Joyce’s style as “hard, clear-cut, with no waste of words.”76 For Eliot, “It is the first realization of a highly original style of writing: saying many things that other writers would leave unspoken and omitting much detail that other writers would think it necessary to put in.”77 Significant, too— especially for listeners in India—was Eliot’s take on Joyce’s Irishness. Although Eliot claims that Joyce’s “standards were European,” he hardly copies Pound’s contempt for Ireland, arguing instead that Joyce’s ability to assimilate English writers yet also stand detached from them as an Irishman, and particularly one who “had the peculiar mental discipline of a Jesuit school,” was a virtue.78 After reviewing Joyce’s education in Ireland, his move to the Continent, and the many languages he spoke, Eliot discusses the background to the Wake: “I emphasize his interest in languages as well as in literatures: for his passionate interest in words, and his wide acquaintance with the languages of Europe, give some clue to the understanding of his later work.” Not only did Joyce use this knowledge of language but, turning next to Joyce’s eyesight, Eliot points out that Joyce had several operations and periods of almost complete blindness, and that this biographical detail, too, helps to clarify Joyce’s work: The partial blindness robbed him of his visual experience, and helps to account for the fact that in all his chief works he draws upon memories of his youth in Ireland. But a blind man can still hear. We can draw a certain parallel between Joyce and John Milton. Both lost their sight, and had to have people read to them; and both were musicians. . . . The combination of great musical gifts with blindness seems to have resulted, in the later work of both men, in writing which makes its strongest appeal to the ear. . . . Joyce’s last book has to be read aloud, preferably in an Irish voice; and, as the one gramophone record which he made attests, no other voice could read it, not even another Irish voice, as well as Joyce could read it

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himself. This is a limitation which has made more slow the appreciation and enjoyment of his last book.79

Eliot here proposes a reading at odds with his earlier celebration of the “mythical method.” Instead of attuning oneself to intertextual cues, Eliot proposes reading aloud, “doing the Wake in different voices,” listening to Joyce’s recording, and appreciating the work’s appeal to the ear. This sensual appreciation of the Wake is a far cry from the kinds of scholarly study Eliot proposes elsewhere. Eliot’s approach goes a long way in making the Wake more accessible to the common reader and, coupled with Eliot’s wide audience in India and England (his talk was reprinted in the Listener), constitutes a striking example of the use of radio to spread and popularize modernism. I will have more to say on E. M. Forster’s broadcasts in the next chapter, but for now I want to show how for Forster, talks were conversations in more than one sense. Partially because Forster’s broadcast followed only a few months after Eliot’s, his is a meta-metacommentary, framed as a review not of Joyce’s work directly but of Harry Levin’s James Joyce (1941). This is a striking example of the broadcast participating in a scholarly conversation otherwise unfolding in print. But of course this movement into and out of print goes in both directions: in addition to Forster’s admiration for the accessibility of Levin’s work, he encourages listeners to seek out Eliot’s broadcast in the Listener; he tells his audience: “With Mr. Eliot’s talk and this book of Mr. Harry Levin’s, you’ll have the necessary preparation” after noting that he had recently finished a second reading of Ulysses.80 Like Eliot, Forster points to the musicality of Joyce’s prose as a way into his late work. Building on Eliot’s earlier broadcast, Forster maintains the tone of humility, admitting to frustration that only outside reading had cured. Forster admits to not having yet read Finnegans Wake and to disliking most Joyce criticism, whether it be abusive or “proceed[ing] from highly trained critics who are sympathetic to him and rather above the general public’s head. I believe that there are a good number of readers who are in the same boat as myself—that’s to say muddled and vexed by the uncomfortable fellow but certain that he’s not a fake, and it’s to them I’m now speaking.” Forster’s positioning of himself as a frustrated reader, and one who consults secondary sources, is part of a larger effort to extend the conversational ethos of the broadcast talk.

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Strong’s program was much longer and is proportionately more complex. Broadcast on October 5, 1946, it takes place two years after Eliot’s and Forster’s broadcasts. As far as I can tell, this is only the second time Joyce’s reading of “Anna Livia Plurabelle” was broadcast, with Strong playing passages from a 1929 record made by C. K. Ogden at his Orthological Institute at Cambridge.81 The recording itself makes up over 10 percent of the program. A thirty-minute installment of the Book of Verse series, “based in general on the poems being studied at Universities in India,” Strong’s broadcast takes advantage of his half hour to cover more ground than other reviewers, including three of Joyce’s poems (XI from Chamber Music and “She Weeps Over Rahoon” and “Tilly” from Pomes Pennyeach) as well as two passages from Portrait. Unlike other commentators, Strong focuses on Portrait in addition to the Wake in order to create a narrative of increasing subjectivity in Joyce’s oeuvre, with Ulysses forming a balance between the two and Finnegans Wake “go[ing] the whole hog,” carrying “the exploration of the inner world, the unconscious mind, to its extreme.”82 After the brief excerpt from Joyce reading, Strong shares his experience reading from the Wake to a group of schoolchildren, as a means of illustrating the text’s affective dimension: “Not one of the children could possibly have understood it consciously, with his brain: but because they were nearer to the state of mind Joyce was addressing . . . they listened with breathless attention, and, at the end, asked me to read it again” (1). In Strong’s anecdote, the children are better outfitted to enjoy the Wake because they can enjoy something emotionally rather than intellectually. But in order to explain how Joyce’s writing got here, Strong discusses each of his major works in turn, explaining how “[Joyce] began as an objective writer, an extrovert, and ended up at the deepest extreme of introversion and subjectivity” (3). Though Strong includes three poems, he cautions that, though they are musical and beautiful, he shares the opinion of Eliot and Forster that Joyce’s prose is like poetry and of more interest. Noting Joyce’s difficulty and range, Strong builds a tradition for Joyce that is partly familiar and partly new. Picking up on Ezra Pound’s early essays on Dubliners, he suggests that the stories are modeled on Flaubert, grounding his claim by citing the technique employed by Flaubert in “Hérodias” and Joyce in “Ivy Day in the Committee Room,” of relaxing “the tension in a final paragraph of one sentence only” (5). Joyce’s naturalism is attested to by a reading of the famous Christmas dinner scene in Portrait

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in which Stephen’s father and Mr. Casey argue with Dante over the Church’s stand against Parnell. Showing the range of the novel, however, Strong next includes a passage from Stephen’s walk along the shore and asks his listeners: As you hear this will you listen, please, for the influence of music, both in the subject matter and the writing: will you look out for the preoccupation with words which was to end in the manufactured words and groups of words in Finnegans Wake: will you listen for the longing to penetrate the depths of the unconscious mind, the depths within, to look deep, deep, into the self and to escape from time and hear the music and the language of another world. (8)

Strong points to “the psychology of Jung, on which his last book is based,” as well as Vico, who showed Joyce that “civilization develops in a spiral” and that if one could “understand one cycle,” one held “the clue to all cycles, all epochs, all periods.” Pound, Jolas, and Beckett had all discussed these influences previously. But in addition to showing Joyce’s European influences, Strong makes a move to domesticate Joyce, to make a case for Joyce’s Englishness. “The even greater help,” claims Strong, was “the Romantic Movement in English literature.” In that it “releases the less conscious parts of the mind,” the Romantic Movement allowed Joyce to use one particular city, and even one particular river, in the course of a single night to convey “all periods of the world’s history” (11). For Strong, Finnegans Wake is equal parts William Blake and Giambattista Vico—a continuation of an English tradition rather than a complete break from it, thus marshaling the Wake in the name of British culture’s universality. A unique and valuable service provided by Strong is his modeling of interpretive practice—before he plays the recording of Joyce reading from “Anna Livia Plurabelle,” he gives two close-readings of passages in the section to show his listeners that “this is not nonsense” (12). Strong’s gloss of “Is that the Poolbeg flasher beyant, pharphar, or a fireboat coasting nyar the Kishtna or a glow I behold within a hedge or my Garry come back from the Indes” points to memories of watching Dublin harbor and seeing two different lightships, Poolbeg and Kish (215.1–3). “Phar” suggests pharos, Greek for lighthouse; “Kish,” Krishna; and “Indes,” India; “the fireboat carries the dead body down the river to be burnt: and ‘Indes’ at the end clinches an association which is arranged out of sequence, and out of time,

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because it works backwards and forwards at once” (12). Pointing to a later passage, “Teems of times and happy returns. The seim anew. Ordovico or viricordo. Anna was, Livia is, Plurabelle’s to be” (215.22–24). Strong finds a reference to Vico and states that the Viconian cycle applies to the Liffey, which is here “extended in time” (12). Strong’s broadcast is—by including interpretations or glosses of particular passages—far and away the most detailed broadcast on the Wake as well as the most convincing. The fact that it highlighted the Indian influence on the Wake to Indian listeners also begins to shake the novel out of the Eurocentric frame that the broadcast otherwise furthers. In this limited sense, Strong anticipates, by many years, postcolonial readings of the novel. The Irish poet and novelist James Stephens broadcast three times on the life and work of Joyce, and though Eliot and Beach too drew on their experiences interacting with Joyce, Stephens had a unique and privileged relationship with him, particularly during the composition of the Wake. Growing tired of the arduous composition process and sensing that he had created a machine that could largely progress on its own, Joyce considered having Stephens finish the work for him. In a letter to Harriet Shaw Weaver in April 1927, Joyce proposes the replacement and expresses his doubts about the practicality of his writing process: “[Stephens] would never take a fraction of the time or pains I take but so much the better for him and me and possibly for the book itself. If he consented to maintain three or four points which I consider essential and I showed him the threads he could finish the design” (L, 1:253–54). As Stephens’s first broadcast on Joyce, The James Joyce I Knew, on October 8, 1946, indicates, this faith in Stephens came as a surprise. Their first meeting in London ended when Joyce “turned his chin and his specs at me, and away down at me, and confided the secret to me that he had read my two books; that, grammatically, I did not know the difference between a semi-colon and a colon; that my knowledge of Irish life was non-Catholic and, so, non-existent, and that I should give up writing and take to a good job like shoe-shining as a more promising profession.”83 When Joyce got in touch with Stephens later in Paris, Stephens was surprised but flattered; having discovered that they shared the same birthday, Joyce decided to strike up a friendship, about which Stephens was always skeptical.84 The two writers met frequently in Paris, and Joyce’s idea of having Stephens complete the Wake became a formal request by 1929.85 In

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November 1929 Joyce wrote to Weaver: “James Stephens was over here for a week. I saw him nearly every day and explained to him all about the book, at least a great deal, and he promised me that if I found it was madness to continue, in my condition, and saw no other way out, that he would devote himself heart and soul to the completion of it, that is the second part and the epilogue or forth. I was very glad to speak with him and we will leave it at that for the moment” (L, 1:288). Exactly what Joyce told Stephens remains a mystery, and nowhere in his broadcast about Joyce does Stephens hint at his potential role in completing Finnegans Wake, let alone the “four points” that Joyce considered essential, but Stephens’s broadcasts are informed by these experiences even if he refused to reveal Joyce’s secrets. Instead, Stephens reads from the beginning of the passage he gushed over in his negotiations with Joyce over potentially finishing the Wake, the “Anna Livia Plurabelle” episode, preceding his reading with a note on Joyce’s “pure prose.” Stephens claims: “In a sense the thing which we term pure would have little intellectual or emotional value: it should have gone beyond the relative exchange we call value. . . . In Finnegans Wake Joyce was trying to write pure prose. When we have said all that we can say about this book we will make two statements only: we shall say, “It is unreadable,” and we shall add, “It is wonderful.”86 But while references to the Wake in The James Joyce I Knew are vague, Stephens significantly expanded his take on the work in a 1947 broadcast, “Finnegans Wake.”87 Remaining true to the Wake’s investment in opposites, Stephens neatly balances conflicting statements. First he claims, “I would call Finnegans Wake Joyce’s autobiography; factual, imaginative, spiritual,” but he just as quickly dispenses with the author, “Sometimes I think that when you are discussing a book you had better get rid of the author.” Joyce’s love for Dublin “was both innocent and wicked” and Joyce, “Where he liked he disliked a lot: where he disliked he liked also. He rather dislikingly liked every thing that happened.” Following from this sense of opposites and contrariness is a deep skepticism, “Thank heaven, I am not whatever it is, and I don’t have to whatever it may be, and if you listen with only one ear you may be glad you didn’t listen with the other—But perhaps my reading is all wrong anyhow.”88 But for all the doubt surrounding this work, there is a central distinction to be made:

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Every other book is written in prose. This book is written in speech. Speech and prose are not the same thing. They have different wavelengths, for speech moves at the speed of light, where prose moves at the speed of the alphabet, and must be consecutive and grammatical and word perfect. . . . Now it is soliloquy, now it is dialogue, it becomes at times oration and tittle-tattle and scandal, but it is always a speech, and, however it be punned upon by all the European and a few of the Asiatic tongues, it is fundamentally the speech that used to be Dublin-English . . . and even when it is serious it isn’t as serious as all that, for it easily makes up in abundance and exuberance for all that it lacks in meaning. The meaning isn’t lacking, but it isn’t meaning as the crow flies: ‘tis rather, meaning as the bee bumbles, honey here and honey there and heather-honey on the mountain.89

Stephens draws attention to the medium of the broadcast (through his insistence on speech over prose and his pun on wavelengths) to present new and exciting insights into the Wake that the other commentators missed. Rather than the Wake serving as a prompt to affect, or pure music, Stephens argues that, as speech, the Wake must be read differently—not linearly, but rather as accumulating meaning slowly, through clusters of themes and ideas, which Stephens’s image of the bee captures so well (an image that doubles as a figure for his talk’s organizational logic). Here the Wake is still for the common reader to tackle but not in the purely aesthetic manner proposed by other critics. Instead, the Wake is composed of different kinds of speech, and Stephens is wise to point out that looking at the Wake as DublinEnglish is a promising approach. Only by recalling the importance of the Dublin-English transmitted to Joyce’s apartment in Paris, where it mingled with the King’s English of the BBC and was incorporated into Joyce’s final work, can we adequately appreciate the dynamic interaction between broadcasting and the novel. EARWICKER’S RADIO

The clash of accents and interests in early transnational radio was both captured by and retransmitted from Finnegans Wake. Yet there is a strand of media studies scholarship that misrecognizes the Wake’s interest in media as prosthesis, or what Marshall McLuhan calls an “extension of man.”90 Joyce’s oeuvre, and Finnegans Wake in particular, were central to McLuhan’s thinking. But some of McLuhan’s followers have flattened the Wake’s

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investment in untangling the complex relationship between human senses and media to a reading of media as metaphor for the body. The result is a kind of quietism latent in McLuhan but extended in later iterations of media studies that delimit their concerns to the immediate physical body. I read the work of Lisa Gitelman and Raymond Williams (with their interest in the social and political use of media) as a counterbalance to this trend, one that I hope to extend in this chapter. By way of conclusion, then, I want to return to the description of the radio in Earwicker’s pub, which combines a number of radiophonic terms with other themes. As Donald Theall points out, the paragraph can be read as a list of body parts that “include the cranium (‘a howdrocephalous enlargement’ [310.6]) and the brain (‘harmonic condenser enginium’ [310.1]), the mouth (‘vitaltone speaker’ [309.31]), the eyes (‘circumcentric megacycles’ [310.7]) . . . and the ears (‘umbrella antennas for distance getting’ [309.17–18]).”91 This process is then compressed in references to parts of the inner ear, from the Eustachian tube to the hammer, anvil, and stirrup. By highlighting these connections, Theall posits that Joyce is helping to imagine both the ways in which audio technologies were offered as extensions of the body as well as the ways in which these new technologies had a role in the modern technological regulation of the body. While I do not disagree with this reading, its exploration of an established area in media studies (technology as prosthesis) leads Theall to miss how radio was emphatically public (unlike inscription technologies like film, the typewriter, and the phonograph) and to neglect the much larger body here, the body politic. It is not that attending to media as prosthesis is necessarily divorced from attention to political and historical contexts. But given the Wake’s immersion in myth, it is perhaps uniquely prone to readings that ignore or downplay the novel’s historical moment. The description of the pub’s radio captures the sense of conflict surrounding early radio that I have unfolded in this chapter: their tolvtubular high fidelity daildialler, as modern as tomorrow afternoon and in appearance up to the minute, (hearing that anybody in that ruad duchy of Wollinstown schemed to halve the wrong type of date) equipped with supershielded umbrella antennas for distance, getting and connected by the magnetic links of a Bellini-Tosti coupling system with a vitaltone speaker, capable of capturing skybuddies, harbour craft emittences, key clickings, vaticum cleaners, due to woman

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formed mobile or man made static bawling the whowle hamshack and wobble down in an eliminium sounds pound so as to serve him up a melegoturny marygoraumd, eclectrically filtered for allirish earths and ohmes. (309.14–310.1)

Beyond its map of the human sensorium, the description of the radio reckons with Ireland’s uneasy position between the Church and England as it forges its own national identity. Ireland is figured here as a rude, or unsophisticated, colony that produced the Duke of Wellington and that was conquered in the past by invaders from the famed Viking city of Wollin, with which HCE is associated as an invader and conqueror. Playing on the strength of the Catholic Church in Ireland, the radio transmits “vaticum cleaners” invoking the Vatican as well as vacuum cleaners (which caused interference) and is “eclectrically filtered,” pairing eclectic, again suggesting Church censorship, to electric.92 The idea of Ireland as a pure, Celtic and Catholic country is undermined here with the reminders of Viking invasions, with the fact that Wellington—one of England’s greatest soldiers—was Irish, and through multilingual punning that recalls the ways in which any language imports words from other languages, Irish included. More than simply a way to ground the polyphonic narrative, the radio’s description captures the contentious, even violent uses and debates over wireless, like Douglas Hyde’s position in his inaugural broadcast that the radio would be used to wipe out the foreign influence.93 The extent to which the Wake engages with interwar broadcasting and its attempted use to shore up the nation has been overlooked, as has the medium’s importance in creating a reading public for the novel. Paying closer attention to these relationships, we gain a much richer sense of how a work as abstract as the Wake was nonetheless a vehicle for colonial critique and simultaneously and ironically forwarded to defend the very empire it sets out to attack.

Chapter Two

REVIEWING SOME BOOKS E. M. Forster as Blind Uncle

A blind uncle is better than none. — BENGALI PROVERB

A CLOSET MODERNIST

The modernist writer has been described as “a man of tremendous guts,” an iconoclast whose work challenges “clichés, not merely of language but of ideas and even of values,” but it would surprise many to hear this said of E. M. Forster.1 In the hands of Anglo-American critics like Fredric Jameson, Forster is widely seen as “at best a closet modernist,” with an “antitechnological bias” and a vision limited to English middle-class life.2 In contrast to the epic ambition of Marcel Proust or the stylistic pyrotechnics of James Joyce, Forster is “irritating in his refusal to be great,” leaving Lionel Trilling to wish Forster’s style “less comfortable and more arrogant.”3 Narayana Menon, who worked with Forster at the BBC’s Eastern Service, offers a different, even unexpected, take on him. That the most radical early twentieth-century Indian writers widely shared this view should give us pause. A shift in perspective, specifically a consideration of Forster’s broadcasts and essays as “significant work,” was enough to inspire Menon to observe: “Intelligent, solid, well-equipped critics who have not looked into his essays have written of the ‘shy, unworldly quality’ of his work, ‘almost diffidently presented!’ How wrong they are.”4 As Menon well knew, Forster and his Indian coworkers at the BBC turned what was supposed to be a source of imperial propaganda into an unlikely but vivacious cauldron of

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artistic experimentation and transnational exchange. Forster’s modernism was not primarily between the covers of his novels; it was on the radio. The humble title of Forster’s monthly, fifteen-minute Some Books program—broadcast over the BBC’s Eastern Service from 1941 to 1947—belies the complex ways in which it registered and furthered the disjunctive flows of modernism. The title sounds impossibly capacious, as if the program would deal with a random or haphazard assortment of books. For Forster’s Indian listeners, it could often seem that way, tackling books of history, journalism, politics, and science in addition to literature, art exhibitions, concerts, and plays. However, its refusal of a more precise adjective is significant beyond the maintenance of Forster’s freedom of critical movement. Some Books eschews every tried-and-true system of literary classification, from genre, language, nationality, period, and canonical status to personal taste (“favorite,” say), in large part because Forster envisioned and maintained his program as a platform to discuss and promote the products of increasingly nomadic writers and fractal publishing structures. Ostensibly meant to connect England and India, a project to which Forster was committed, his program also exploded neat boundaries of place, time, and cultural belonging. The broadcast talk is a curious genre. It is an unusual (and often ignored) object of critical attention, a literary oddity in equal parts because of its brevity, novelty, and intimacy. Forster worked alongside Hilda Matheson in the BBC’s early days to establish the humbler contours of the genre. When Richard Maconachie took over after Matheson’s resignation, cultural talks were categorized as “popular” rather than “serious,” allowing Forster and other Bloomsbury figures to maintain their initial, conversational style of delivery as well as their “unconventional” political positions.5 “Paradoxically, the lower status for cultural talks, far from curtailing broadcasters’ critical and ideological liberty, instead enhanced it,” writes Todd Avery.6 Forster maintained his conversational style throughout his broadcasting career, partially through the occasional direct address of the audience, as when he told his Indian listeners: “In talking to you overseas, I have to wonder what subject interests you.”7 Forster regularly called attention to the technical aspects of radio—often the microphone before him—as well as the limited, fixed time he was given to speak. While protocols surrounding the use of technology generally become cemented over time, Forster’s use of radio is an exception. If, as Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin suggest,

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remediation takes place between the two poles of immediacy and hypermediacy, Forster’s work resides closer to the latter than the former. Given Forster’s tendency to draw attention to the affordances and limitations of the medium even as he employed it, his case is well worth returning to, highlighting what single-author analysis (generally unpopular in media studies) can bring to the table. Supplementing Forster’s particularly informal take on the talk genre were his unique voice and accent: “His voice was a measured, slightly wiry tenor; his accent suburban, much less plummy than the Received Pronunciation that the BBC director, Sir John Reith, dictated. . . . There was no getting around the intimacy of Morgan’s distinctive voice. It was of a piece with his argument.”8 As the few extant sound recordings reveal, Forster’s voice was a far cry from the confident, authoritative voices of the announcers bookending his talks.9 In Audience Research reports gathered after the war, listeners praised the “ease of Forster’s broadcasting manner,” with one summary of responses claiming that “there was appreciation for his urbanity and the tolerance and understanding evident as much in his manner of speaking as in what he said.”10 Extending Forster’s friendly tone were rhetorical moves he learned through talks he gave at the Working Men’s College in London, not to mention a lifetime of speaking intimately with working-class men outside of the classroom. Forster preferred to give his talks live in the studio but used the necessity of recording his talks in 1943 as an opportunity to further his cultivation of intimacy, telling his listeners that “there’s machinery enough already, in all conscience, both at this end and in India, without having a spinning black gramophone disc as well.”11 When the likelihood of German bombs decreased in 1944, Forster switched back to live delivery of his talks to India, with replays of Some Books recorded directly from the live transmission over the Eastern Service.12 In Forster’s hands, the talk also possesses a relentless, roving inquisitiveness. Because none of the talks offer sustained engagements with any single text, theme, or place, they have largely escaped serious consideration. But rather than the loosely constellated nature of Forster’s talks detracting from their value, their very fragmentation has advantages. The broadcasts give narrative form to the perpetually revolutionary energy and effects of modernity but do so in a baggy, supple way—indeed this is their central value. The lack of closure in Some Books embodies the contradictions it

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identifies rather than resolving them. Forster’s writerly dissatisfaction with the particular ways different authors responded to the war kept him searching across the globe for a satisfying answer.13 That he never found one is a boon for us. Forster’s account of Indian culture and thought is more nuanced than many critics of his fiction have realized, despite occasional use of keywords and phrases that arouse suspicions of Manichean thinking, like Forster’s distinction between “culture here and culture your end” (BBC, 258). In his program, Forster stresses the fallacy of monolithic conceptions of national culture, arguing, for example, that the works he reviewed “suggest that there are several Englands as well as several Indias” (BBC, 186–87). While I attend in this chapter to Forster’s efforts to complicate the narrative of East-West cultural exchange, his talks are nonetheless undergirded by the propaganda directives issued by the Ministry of Information. In the previous chapter I showed how Joyce’s Finnegans Wake—despite its explicit critique of empire radio—was nonetheless forwarded as an example of the universality of British culture. Forster’s preexisting interest in India, skepticism of empire, pacifism, and commitment to free speech and individual liberty were—however heartfelt—completely aligned with the propaganda plans for the Eastern Service. Though a far cry from the black propaganda offered by the Germans on Azad Hind Radio, Forster’s broadcasts were explicitly labeled propaganda in internal BBC documents, despite his protests to the contrary.14 Not only was Forster approved by the MOI to broadcast, but also his general interest in Indian culture boosted the strategy of “projecting” Britain abroad in favorable terms. Closest to the spirit of Forster’s talks was the MOI strategy of underlining “destruction of European culture and values; burning of books, totalitarianisation of art, literature, universities, etc., suppression of free speech and Press; spoliation of European treasures.”15 Forster sprinkles examples of these throughout his talks, but just as important, his arguments for freedom of expression—and even his work to push the envelope of acceptable topics—was itself an implicit argument friendly to British war strategy. Thus it is important to understand that even Forster at his seemingly most transgressive was nonetheless in line with propaganda directives. While Forster’s restaging of previous centrifugal cultural models was thus contained and even blessed by then current propaganda directives, it is simultaneously a rich site from which to examine how Forster nurtured

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modernism’s internationalism. Social conditions and technological capability combined to create an environment in which the transnational was stressed on both ends—receivers listed city names along with frequencies, and shortwave stations like the Eastern Service created and disseminated programming to reach listeners far afield. That writers like Forster used the service to cultivate transnational dialogue has been overlooked in large part because the Empire Service was originally conceived exclusively as a means of emitting imperial views in a unidirectional manner from London to the furthest reaches of empire.16 Forster reversed this logic by facilitating the circulation of people, books, and ideas from India to London. A consideration of Forster’s extensive engagement with broadcasting brings to the fore neglected works and positions that reveal a more complex dialogue between British modernism and imperialism, even as it reinforced the empire through the war. Turning to Forster’s Indian broadcasts can keep the empire in focus as radio studies takes a transnational turn, registering the power dynamics involved as new scholarship probes the medium’s long-standing disregard for terrestrial boundaries. As Michele Hilmes argues in her book on the significance of transnational competition and collaboration between American and British broadcasters, scholarship on radio too often overlooks the international context of wireless, focusing instead on domestic broadcasting (Thomas Hajkowski, Siân Nicholas).17 A few studies that have examined radio as an international medium have employed an overly simplified center / periphery model that fails to correspond to broadcasting practices beyond the early 1930s (Douglas Kerr, Asa Briggs). These histories identify and critique the imperial values of BBC directors like John Reith, but they unwittingly maintain Reith’s oversimplified centrifugal model of cultural diffusion. Representative of this trend is Kerr’s analysis of George Orwell’s experience at the Eastern Service, where he argues: “The BBC Eastern Service in wartime was an organ of colonial discourse, propagating the word, and the worldview, of the metropolitan centre to its peripheral subject people.”18 Certainly, the material broadcast over the Eastern Service served Britain’s propaganda aims, but Kerr’s account, and those that fail to acknowledge or analyze the role of Indian writers at the BBC, distort the historical record in two significant ways: First, these studies miss the development of the BBC Empire Service from an “organ of colonial discourse” to the contact zone it became in the 1940s. They thus posit the British writer

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FIGURE 2.1. E. M. Forster consults with Z. A. Bokhari, Indian program organizer. Copyright © BBC.

(Orwell in this instance) as a solitary figure disseminating his views or works to peripheral—in both senses of the word—subjects in empire, thus ignoring the rich, interactive environment at the BBC, where writers of different nationalities collaborated on broadcast programs. Second, these accounts overlook the role that the colonies had in shaping metropolitan identity, literature, and publishing practices in the first place. Forster’s broadcasts are such a valuable resource precisely because they complicate this familiar story. Not only did Forster collaborate with Indian writers in and out of the BBC, but he was also profoundly shaped as a writer by his experiences in Egypt and India. Whereas the examination of Orwell’s

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BBC work in isolation threatens to erase his listeners, tuning into Forster’s output emphasizes the agency of his Indian listeners as well as the many intellectuals (Indian and English) who worked at the BBC during the war. A number of policy makers hoped to use broadcasting as a means of shoring up the empire—or holding on to it until the war was over. But returning to the context of Forster’s broadcasts allows us to appreciate how—like Desmond MacCarthy, Virginia Woolf, and other members of the Bloomsbury Group who brought their “politically, socially, and culturally oppositional stances” to the microphone—Forster made an uneasy and temporary alliance with the apologists of empire.19 Although histories of the BBC offer rich insight into the behind-the-scenes operations of administrators, they often ignore the ways in which individual broadcasters put these ideas into practice. An analysis of Forster’s Some Books program will allow for a more nuanced account of the Eastern Service, Forster’s career, and the cultural dynamics of late empire, one that articulates the limits within which he worked without completely dismissing the results. Forster used the international span and cosmopolitan staff of the BBC to turn the Eastern Service into a laboratory of postcolonial criticism. Of the many Indian intellectuals at the Empire Service, Forster counted several as personal friends, including Mulk Raj Anand, Ahmed Ali, and M. J. Tambimuttu. As Anand later remembered, “Friendship is a private thing and, fortunately, it has always been possible for the liberal English intelligentsia to befriend the lonely Indian student, to welcome the talented poet, and to make reversals of die-hard attitudes.”20 Forster promoted publications by these writers both inside and outside the BBC. The practice of having all contributors to a broadcast sit around the same table and shift seats to address the microphone further reinforced the sense of communal production. The presence of so many leading Indian writers in London and Forster’s interest in and interaction with them complicate who could be considered “metropolitan” and who “peripheral.” To tell the story of how Forster used the BBC to challenge clichés of language, ideas, and values, I start with his trip to India in 1945, where he temporarily interrupted his BBC program to broadcast on All India Radio. Forster’s act of turning these texts into essays in Two Cheers for Democracy (1951) serves as a departure point to consider how his broadcasts challenge imperial conceptions of temporality, which assume that thought and action originate in the metropole and only subsequently travel to the colonies.

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Instead, Forster’s writing from the period originates in India and appears subsequently in England, mirroring a larger pattern Forster identifies in Some Books, that some of the most radical and significant writing of the time originates in the colonies. In the second section I hone in on Forster’s radio program to show how he used his platform to challenge censorship and welcome experiments with Indian English. In the third section I trace the development of Forster’s intimate address in the interwar years by contrasting his little-known anti-imperial writings and growing queer canon with a series of talks organized by the Colonial Office. By way of conclusion I return to A Passage to India to reflect on the ways in which the novel not only anticipates events in the Second World War but also offers an overlooked but incisive critique of the limitations of adhering to nationalism, whether Indian or British. SYNCHRONIZING MODERNITIES

Narayana Menon’s characterization of Forster as rebel in this chapter’s opening is predicated on an engagement with Forster’s essays and broadcasts. If Forster’s novel Howards End can only gesture toward the expanse of the colonies, as Fredric Jameson has suggested, Forster’s nonfiction exhibits a much more complicated geography.21 Forster’s visit to India in 1945 (his third) was the occasion for four broadcasts on All India Radio, all four of which were later retooled for delivery over the BBC’s Home Service; in fact, much of Forster’s war and postwar writing was intended for an Indian audience and only subsequently repurposed for an English audience. Forster’s familiarity with Indian writers and writing usefully complicates centrifugal models of culture in that it highlights the exchange of cultural goods between London and the colonies. If the broadcasts help theorize the spatial dynamics of empire, they also challenge colonial conceptions of temporality wherein the imperial center represents all that is modern, while the colonies await a more complete modernization. The complicated flows of his own oeuvre allowed Forster to appreciate the extent to which center and periphery were interconnected and that the periphery could be the site of innovation. The broadcasts aid, then, in rethinking the different temporalities of modernity in that shortwave, as a modern technology par excellence, allowed information to pass great distances nearly instantaneously. Applied

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to the arts, historicism suggests that if modernism even happened in the colonies, it was a belated and watered-down phenomenon. The transnational scope of broadcasts coupled with Forster’s emphasis on newly published books from around the world therefore aids in the ongoing project of rethinking Eurocentric, teleological narratives of progress and modernization. Forster’s coverage of books published in India also serves as a historical counterpoint to the more recent state of affairs, whether that be Graham Huggan’s version wherein “Indian literature in English” has become “a literalised consumer item,” written, published, and marketed in and for the West, or Sarah Brouillette’s more nimble characterization of multiple markets composed of “a fragmenting and proliferating set of niche audiences” that are nonetheless united “by a set of general rules dictated by the major transnational corporations.”22 In other words, it would be anachronistic at best to directly apply later market-oriented critiques of postcolonial writing to this period. Instead of a profitable niche within a globalized economy, Indian writing is here useful not in financial terms but rather for its role in projecting Britain as a diverse, tolerant society. If the transnational scope of Forster’s radio program (along with the sheer variety of the material he reviewed) plays up the image of Britain as multicultural, it also provides an opportunity to reexamine global modernization. Radio can be used to coordinate multiple temporalities. Néstor García Canclini argues that despite the hybridity of programming, broadcasting functions as a synchronizing force in Latin American cities: “Radio and television, in placing in relation to each other diverse historical, ethnic, and regional patrimonies and diffusing them massively, coordinate the multiple temporalities of different spectators.”23 In other words, by absorbing and retransmitting elements of different cultures on a grand scale, broadcasting emphasizes the simultaneous presence of multiple temporalities while “coordinat[ing]” them for individuals. Empire broadcasting extends this feature, connecting London and India in near simultaneity. At the BBC, however, Forster extended this function by discussing books from all over the globe and by explicitly theorizing how modernity’s ruptures were refracted in literature. Because the Eastern Service was more accommodating with content than the Home Service, and because of Forster’s sustained interest in India, over half of his 145 broadcast talks were directed to the country.24 The sheer number of Forster’s broadcasts to India point to his ongoing interest in and

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affection for the people and literature of the subcontinent. More important, however, they reveal a complex circulation of books, ideas, and people that provides a new depth to understanding the workings of empire and radio, emphasizing the extent to which these artists made a virtue of physical distance in an attempt to form more equitable relations. As Forster’s familiarity with Indian writers like Anand, Ali, and Tambimuttu suggests—and in sharp contrast with BBC domestic programming as well as the work of some fellow Eastern Service broadcasters like T. S. Eliot—many of Forster’s broadcasts concerned not only English and Continental fiction but Anglophone Indian books or, occasionally, books by English authors on India as well.25 The largest percentage of Forster’s talks are international in scope, covering a number of continental writers within one talk. While Forster reviews many books by English authors, he just as frequently reviews books by Indian writers or by English writers on India.26 In sixteen broadcasts, Forster covered the works of English writers, but in sixteen others, he discusses either Indian writers exclusively or British writers interchangeably (as in the February 3, 1943, broadcast, which considered new volumes by C. S. Lewis and Mulk Raj Anand side by side).27 The varying national foci of Forster’s broadcasts point to the physical circulation of both books and people, with the BBC serving as a valuable contact zone. Forster was in a particularly good place to talk to India, having traveled there in 1912–1913 (at the invitation of his friend Syed Ross Masood) and again from 1921 to 1922 (during which time he worked as the private secretary to the Maharajah of Dewas State senior). Having lived there and having written the famous A Passage to India, Forster was revered by both English and Indian readers. Years after Ahmed Bokhari left his post at AIR, he continued to deploy Passage as a Rorschach test, asking colleagues at the United Nations what they made of the cave scene and then arguing that “the intention of the author was that the only thing of importance was the grossly exaggerated attention given to that otherwise unimportant detail.”28 Conversations in Bloomsbury, Anand’s recollection of his early years in England, quotes Nikhil Sen telling a jingoistic English writer: “I suggest, Sir, that you take a chair in an Indian University for a few years. . . . You might be able to go beyond Kipling’s Kim to Forster’s A Passage to India.”29 Beyond revealing the reverence with which he approached Forster, Anand’s conversations describe various locations of London literary discussion, from Virginia Woolf’s drawing room to various bookshops, and

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the BBC served as one such literary meeting place. Narayana Menon, for example, in a collection of tributes to Forster from six Indian writers, notes: “I still remember vividly my first meeting with him in the corridors of the British Broadcasting Corporation some twenty years ago. . . . For the next five years we met frequently—at BBC studios, for lunches at the Reform Club, at Abinger Hammer.”30 Other Indian writers supplement Menon’s contribution, describing the assistance, friendship, and on-air publicity Forster provided them over the years. All attest that the spirit of cooperation spilled outside of the recording rooms into less formal and more liminal spaces: hallways, cafeterias, and offices. Conversations with Indian writers at the BBC and outside of it often led to Forster helping Indian writers. From Forster passing manuscripts to publishers and providing prefaces to books, this care extended to writers handing him books to review, as in the case of Menon’s study of Yeats and Anand’s The Sword and the Sickle. The exchange of books extended to volumes Forster purchased on his 1945 trip to India as well as to books mailed by authors and publishers seeking publicity. Forster opens his broadcast on December 2, 1943, by acknowledging one such shipment: Before I say more, let me thank those who have sent me these books, and say that I am glad to mention in my broadcasts books published in India, whenever they are suitable. I can’t make a definite promise, because I only talk once a month and then for under a quarter of an hour, and there’s a great deal of ground to be covered. But if I can include books published in India I will. And I am grateful for them personally. They make me feel less lonely. They remind me that links between culture here and culture your end do exist, and that the microphone, which hangs before me now like a petrified pineapple, is capable of evoking a human response. (BBC, 258)

A few months later he expresses gratitude for Kumara Guru’s Life’s Shadows, further noting, “I was glad to receive it, and as I’ve said once before, I will always, when possible, mention in these talks books sent to me from your country. They may not always reach me, and they may in some cases be unsuitable—technical works, for instance, are unsuitable” (BBC, 297). Whether this reference to technical works constitutes an apology for ignoring large shipments of such books is difficult to determine, but it opens the possibility that there were more books crossing borders than can be inferred

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from a mere consultation of the titles reviewed. Although it is difficult with broadcasting to determine precisely who is listening and how, the shipments of books to Forster constitute a body of physical evidence testifying to an engagement with Indian writers at the very least. While Some Books registers the transnational circulation of books, people, and ideas, undermining center-periphery conceptions of culture, it is also an instructive example of a middle ground between the false universalism of the colonial narrative and an irreducible multiplicity of alternative modernities. Forster’s quick and loose comparisons strike a tentative balance between the acknowledgment of uneven and differently realized processes of modernization and the need to identify and narrate larger structures and patterns. Forster formulates various scenes of modernity but ultimately argues that the spread of total war thrusts writers from disparate locations into similar situations.31 Jane Austen’s world provides a point of contrast to Forster’s moment: Jane Austen chronicles a social system that has completely passed away, in England and elsewhere. Today, families are smaller, the bonds uniting them are looser, when a rectory is warmed it is by central-heating, and when a rector’s daughter has brothers in the Navy she herself probably joins the Wrens. . . . [Austen] didn’t even, in modern parlance, know that there was a war on. . . . This contrast between the writer, then when war was localized and standardized, and the writer today, when war is total, is a striking contrast. (BBC 294–95)

Forster suggests that the agrarian middle-class world of Austen has been surpassed by the nuclear family, central heating, and total war—the last remnants of England’s feudal past annihilated to make room for the present. The pervasiveness of the war leads him to argue that despite varying local conditions, writers from different countries were involved in similar projects. The war changed much in England but it also altered conditions in India, as documented in Forster’s reviews of novels by Indian writers. English, Indian, and continental writers alike struggled with the spread of industrialization, secularization, and the possibilities and pitfalls of nationalism, but these strains became more salient during the war. As Forster points out, the writer faced with total war cannot choose to ignore it as Austen did.

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Forster’s comparative approach enabled him to identify common ground in the struggle to integrate residual and emergent cultures while remaining cognizant of significant differences. Discussing Thomas Hardy, he argues: “He has a deep feeling for old-fashioned characters, and local customs that were dying out . . . you will realize that he was a part of the country he loved, and of an age that has gone forever” (BBC, 169). Hardy’s depictions of the countryside are the occasion for his most poetic moments, but the tragic arc of his novels stems from the inability of his characters to flourish in such surroundings once they have been exposed to modern ideas. The difficulties accompanying attempts to merge the traditional and modern are central in other countries as well. Of two anthologies of Bengali fiction, Forster argues: “They are interested in the collision between the old order and the new—the old order being orthodox Hinduism, with its various social implications, and the new order having two aspects. The humanitarian and the industrial. There is the same collision in English literature . . . [but] it is the suddenness of the break-up that excites the Bengali writers” (BBC, 359). What strikes him about the specific clash between orthodox Hinduism and the newer industrial order is that it is simultaneously local and international. Hinduism is (here) specific to India, but the broader tensions between traditional practices and industrialization are traceable in English and Indian literature alike. Yet there remain important differences. Hardy depicts residual practices specific to his youth in Dorsetshire, where village superstitions—eating fried adders to cure snakebite—are dying out (BBC, 169). In the Bengali stories Forster reviews, the extended family changes the ways in which modernity’s disruptions are  registered. Saratchandra Chatterji’s novel The Deliverance, Forster points out, features a “Hindu joint-family, a form of social life unfamiliar to the west” that cannot survive the strain of in-fighting and is broken up by a law suit (BBC, 357–58). Both Venu Chitale and Attia Hosain, who worked alongside Forster and whose work I discuss in chapter  4, wrote novels on the breakup of the joint-family as well. Further, while industrialization creates tensions in both locations, Forster is careful to note its uneven appearance, in this case by remarking on the rapidity with which these conflicts are unfolding on the subcontinent. This vision of the global village is a significant contribution to literary criticism despite the fact that Forster often bemoaned its aesthetic realization. He bestows rare approval on R. K. Narayan and Chatterji but for the

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most part is unsatisfied with his choices, admitting in many broadcasts that he has not come across any good books. Forster’s personal tastes are for “a novel of human contact and human character,” preferably without much attention to war or politics, and he only begrudgingly admits that it is necessary for writers to address these topics one way or another (BBC, 169). But it would be an oversimplification to argue that Forster’s aesthetics are unconsciously ideological despite claims of disinterestedness and universality. The fact that he is broadcasting against fascism should be considered alongside his statements decrying the political turn of writing in the 1930s and 1940s. Similarly, while he enjoys stories about human character and everyday life rather than overtly political material, he admits about India that “it’s hard to see how anything non-political could at present be written about the country” (BBC, 297). While he claims to do so reluctantly, he addresses war and political writing frequently. Furthermore, when he does so, he gives more time and attention (not to mention praise) to antiimperialist arguments than he gives to the government position. For Forster, contemporary writers were thrust into a situation in which they had to address war and politics, regardless of their nationality. While it frustrated his more committed friends, Forster’s disinterest in topical literature was tempered by his on-air engagement with such material. Forster’s broadcasts challenge the teleological, historicist model in a number of ways. First, he used his program to theorize the knotty relationships between modernism and modernity. Focusing on how material and social conditions affected imaginative products, Some Books coordinated multiple modernities, showing how the acceleration of modernity was a global phenomenon that also left residues of the premodern intact. Second, because the BBC’s Eastern Service was more intellectual than the Home Service, it served as a laboratory for postwar British broadcasting, with the Third Programme modeled on the Eastern Service.32 As Some Books suggests, far from serving as the dumping ground for material from the Home Service or for straightforward colonial propaganda, the Eastern Service allowed more freedom for broadcasters from both censorship and the requirement to provide “light” entertainment instead of more robust, intellectual material. A number of writers were eager to take advantage of this opportunity. As he made clear in a letter to George Barnes, who worked in the domestic Talks Department, Forster preferred overseas broadcasting “because I’m let to rip and even allowed to be obscure

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if I want to be so.”33 Administrators had a much higher opinion of the intellectual capacity of the few Indian listeners than the many English ones. While the Home Service was turning to light music, the Eastern Service allowed and encouraged Forster to dedicate broadcasts to the likes of Marcel Proust, Thomas Mann, and James Joyce. This imbalance in programming meant that, at the conclusion of the war, the Eastern Service—not the Home Service—served as the model for the newly created, culture-oriented Third Programme, with Eastern Service broadcasters helping to imagine and then launch the new channel. Another intellectual service of the BBC that contributed to the Third Programme was intimately tied to empire (and a venue for Forster’s views), the Listener. The Listener regularly featured a surprisingly thorough coverage of colonial writers, many of whom opposed, contradicted, or challenged official views. In fact, the first installment of the publication sets the tone by including an article on the history of art in India in which the chairman of the India Society, Lord Ronaldshay, claims of Indian writing in English: “Here, then, we have a new milestone on the long road of Indian culture and art—one which marks the beginning of an epoch, the possibilities of which may be dimly guessed at, even though, as yet, they cannot fully be foreseen.”34 Ronaldshay’s talk, from January 11, 1929, and entitled “India in Art and Literature,” was part of what the BBC described as an “orgy of Orientalism” that night, including readings of Indian literature by Indian students in London.35 The first issue of the Listener posited a kind of break into a new world of global English that was then documented throughout the periodical’s interwar life. Only shortly thereafter, on December 24, 1930, Mulk Raj Anand received an early boost from a positive review of Persian Painting by Herbert Read. The Listener would go on to publish talks by Anand, Forster, T. S. Eliot, Hsiao Ch’ien, and a host of other Eastern Service broadcasters during the war years, but the publication was also supportive of interwar writing. Edwin Muir praised R. K. Narayan’s The Bachelor of Arts (1937) for its “consummate if unobstrusive skill,” and glowing reviews of Cedric Dover’s Half-Caste (1937), C. L. R. James’s The Black Jacobins (1938), and Anand’s The Village (1939) all appeared in quick succession.36 The Listener had a much more intellectual and progressive worldview than the Home Service. This was very much by design, as Debra Rae Cohen elucidates: editor “[Richard] Lambert’s statement . . . that ‘The Listener will

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devote particular attention to books and reading’ indicated his intention not just to compete for book advertising, but also to build the journal’s independent viability by heightening its brow in relation to the BBC itself.”37 J. R. Ackerley, a close friend of Forster’s and literary editor from 1935 to 1959, inherited and worked to further the Listener’s literary reputation. H. A. L. Fisher, for instance, complained that Ackerley’s poetry selections were “much too precious,” “angular,” “contorted,” and “abstruse.”38 Ackerley took advantage of Forster’s commitment to friendship by requesting and receiving material to publish, circulating Forster’s Indian material to an English audience.39 From 1941 to 1947 the Listener published twenty-three of Forster’s broadcasts, including talks on Mohammed Iqbal, Narayana Menon’s book on William Butler Yeats, and Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar for the Eastern Service’s experiment with distance learning, a series covering titles on Calcutta University’s B.A. exam in English Literature.40 Third, this pattern can be traced in Forster’s oeuvre, with his talks for All India Radio rebroadcast over the BBC and included in his major postwar publication, Two Cheers for Democracy. The subsequent adoption of programming designed by and for Indian listeners and broadcasters reverses the European narrative of modernization. On his third trip to India, at the invitation of the All-India Centre of the P.E.N. Club meeting in 1945, Forster broadcast four talks, one each from Delhi, Calcutta, Hyderabad, and Bombay. His broadcasting career doubles a counterteleological frame in that not only did he broadcast both for the BBC Eastern Service and for All India Radio, but the talks he developed for AIR were repurposed for subsequent talks on the BBC’s Home Service and for print publication in England.41 Nordic Twilight, a pamphlet of Forster’s from 1940, collected three anti-Nazi broadcasts originally written for the Hindustani service but distributed widely at home as a Macmillan War Pamphlet.42 These publications were supplemented by a collection of Eastern Service Talks edited by George Orwell, Talking to India, which was published in November 1943 by George Allen and Unwin. The most substantial example, however, is Forster’s collection of “essays,” many of which are thinly disguised broadcasts; close to half of Two Cheers for Democracy is derived from the Listener.43 An examination of Forster’s broadcasts to India advances a usefully loose narrative of global modernization. The broadcasts overturn some common misconceptions about Forster: that he was a technophobe, that he stopped writing after A Passage to India, and that he was uninterested

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in politics. The BBC, unlike Forster’s novels, was a site where he expressed and furthered—in his characteristically reserved way—ideas that were no less radical for their subtle expression. MODULATING CENSORSHIP

Forster’s style—characterized by humility, uncertainty, irony—is a response to the intellectual readjustment required by modern experience. His most forceful hostility to the traditional took the form of pushing the boundaries of what was representable in fiction, but it has been overlooked because he did so from without the novel rather than from within. Following Gérard Genette’s suggestion that the epitext (extratextual materials such as reviews or author interviews) should be refolded into the text would go some way in clarifying matters.44 On the BBC Forster actively promoted the more formally innovative novelists with whom he is often contrasted. He was part of a larger modernist movement that sought to represent new terrains of experience and neglected points of view. Seeing links between the struggles of queer writers at home and those representing the ramifications of empire, he turned down an invitation to broadcast in a series devoted to “the freedom of the artist,” quipping that he would be unable to praise “the libel laws or the blasphemy laws or the laws related to obscenity, or about colour-prejudice encountered by my fellow-writers from India in this country” (BBC, 24). For Forster, censorship was a means of denying voice, and in turn understanding and sympathy, to those who challenged the status quo. Forster rejected the mantle of wildly experimental aesthetics in his novels, but he argued vigorously that artists were part of an avant-garde. This was their central value to him, and—as his rejection above makes clear—he saw that pushing the boundaries of acceptable topics was linked to formal experimentation, leading him to welcome and reinforce Indian writing in English.45 By combating censorship and supporting Indian literary experiments, Forster made the Eastern Service a way-station in the circulation of new ideas. Forster’s commitment to liberty had a long and personal story that is not revealed through his publishing practices. It is remarkable how much he was willing to fight for others while remaining reticent about causing trouble with his own fiction. As is well documented, after publishing A Passage to India in 1924, he turned increasingly to criticism, publishing a number

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of essay collections and biographies.46 This turn has been explained partially as a protest against, or a means of coping with, his inability to publish fiction dealing with homosexual characters, desires, and situations.47 Between Howards End and A Passage to India, Forster completed a novel, Maurice, but because “the lovers get away unpunished and consequently recommend crime,” he refused to seriously pursue publishing it.48 In a diary entry Forster reflects: “I should have been a more famous writer if I had written or rather published more, but sex has prevented the latter.” 49 Other legal concerns reduced his output as well. Forster gained personal experience with the pernicious side of libel laws when the first edition of Abinger Harvest inadvertently reprinted a libel. Forster and his publisher had to pay £500 plus costs.50 Worse, his loss led him to fear another might follow him as the editor of T. E. Lawrence’s letters (themselves full of queer innuendo), and he reluctantly withdrew from the project. In the face of real danger, Forster consistently resorted to scrupulous self-censorship. Yet the care with which Forster sought to avoid controversy with his own writing is completely absent in his literary broadcasts, where he strove to combat censorship by creating a wider readership or public for writers who subverted normative moral, political, and aesthetic values.51 Forster did so despite an early warning from Reith to avoid mentioning “unhelpful” writers and in the context of public support for Matheson when she resigned.52 The broadcasts are an overlooked but significant counterpart to more polemical statements against censorship, self-reflexively advancing their arguments through indirection and fragmentation rather than outrage and indignation. By promoting censored texts and writers, Forster quietly turned the BBC into a space where the relationship between the social and aesthetic functions of art were explored and contested. These threads emerge in Forster’s 1930 broadcast on D. H. Lawrence, a writer Forster recommended to his Indian listeners no less than five times: He has two publics, neither of them quite satisfactory. There is the general public, who think of him as improper and scarcely read him at all, and there is a special public, who read him but in too narrow and fanatical a way, and thought of him as a sort of god, who had come to change human nature and revolutionise society. His own public—the real public—he hasn’t yet found that, and it is in the hope of persuading you to form part of it that I am speaking. (BBC, 55)

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This intervention is significant in that it explicitly attempts to use the mass media to spread modernism beyond a small coterie of followers to the common reader. But Forster’s sense of moderation makes it easy to overlook another context of his appeal: the challenge to the juridical structures that disallowed the publication and circulation of such material. The general public could not read Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928) for another thirty years, when Penguin generated, and won, an obscenity trial in 1960.53 Less than a year before Forster’s broadcast, an exhibition of Lawrence’s paintings was disrupted when authorities confiscated the canvases, and these were only the most recent examples of Lawrence running afoul of the law. In Forster’s characteristically furtive manner, he distances himself from Lawrence’s most fervent adherents and detractors alike while nonetheless insisting on Lawrence’s position in the cultural vanguard. In Forster’s hands, Lawrence is less pornographic than prescient, leading him to praise “the disquieting apparitions of D. H. Lawrence” in a broadcast to India (BBC, 303). Forster was happy to defend his vision of the artist as part of the avant-garde even if he was unwilling to allow his published fiction to join such ranks. That Forster was allowed to even mention Lawrence, let alone dedicate a broadcast to him, speaks to the ways Forster was able to use his celebrity and reputation as a tool to chip away at restrictions. Just a year later Harold Nicolson’s talk on Ulysses was censored after his series “The New Spirit in Modern Literature,” praising Lawrence and then Joyce, raised the eyebrows of Reith and led to a BBC ban on discussion of contemporary novels tout court.54 Forster bravely quoted from the “Scylla and Charybdis” episode of the banned Ulysses in his series of lectures, “The Creator as Critic,” at Cambridge in 1931.55 Lamenting that such behavior was tolerated in controlled, academic circles and not in public, Forster decided to push the envelope on the airwaves as well. In a talk given on March 10, 1934, and organized around the topic of individual liberty, he argued: “We can’t read or write what we like. Oh, by the way, some publishers of repute intend to bring out an edition of Joyce’s Ulysses in this country: I hope they’ll get away with it because it’s an important work—but we’ll see” (BBC, 125).56 Forster’s casualness, his phrasing suggesting that he mentioned Ulysses as an afterthought, was a successful strategy for circumventing censorship. Forster was not simply reflecting on whether the publication of Ulysses was possible, he

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was himself involved in an experiment to see whether he could “get away with” directly challenging Reith’s rule against mentioning Ulysses by name. Forster gave up hope of publishing his own homosexual fiction as well as the lively correspondence of T. E. Lawrence but, faced with these limitations, nonetheless committed himself to helping other queer writers find larger publics. He did not simply compile a canon of gay writers for his private reference; he actively discussed and promoted this canon on the air. From 1931 to 1932 he gave a series of talks on books and often addressed the work of close friends, many of whom were open about their homosexuality with Forster, such as Gerald Heard, Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, Lytton Strachey, William Plomer, and Christopher Isherwood.57 With Some Books, Forster extended his queer canon by adding Forrest Reid (one of few people to whom he showed Maurice), Marcel Proust, Edward Carpenter, Lionel Fielden, and Benjamin Britten.58 Playing with the lines between his public and private selves, Forster wrote and performed a dialogue between a novelist and a policeman modeled on an early interaction between himself and his lover Bob Buckingham (BBC, 69–79). Forster even brought Buckingham into the studio to play the part of the policeman. Not only did Forster’s support for queer writers influence their reception at the time, but it is clear in retrospect and by the lights of queer theory that Forster created, gathered, and saved these materials for an audience not yet in existence. B. J. Kirkpatrick, reminiscing on her initial failure to catalog Forster’s manuscripts in her otherwise extensive Forster bibliography, remembers: “One day in the early 1960s when I was working on Mr. Forster’s bibliography in his rooms at King’s College, Cambridge, I asked him about his manuscripts. He then opened the doors of two of his cupboards and out they tumbled. I could hardly believe my eyes as I saw Howards End and other treasures slithering to the floor! Scripts of some of his broadcasts to India were there too.”59 Whereas Kirkpatrick initially presents the scene within a narrative of a fumbling, unorganized writer, indifferent to his manuscripts, she later comes to realize that Forster carefully maintained his BBC scripts; after they were passed on to King’s, Kirkpatrick was able to catalog and describe them. Forster’s archival desire is now legible thanks to the writing of Carolyn Dinshaw, who locates Roland Barthes’s “resistance to dominant forms of association . . . in his desire— which I call queer, like mine—for partial, affective connection, for community, for even a touch across time.” 60 Forster’s maintenance of his archive,

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in the face of his frustration at not being able to publish Maurice, resembles  the act of faith Melanie Micir excavates in the late work of Sylvia Townsend Warner: “The intimate archivist mourns the past, feels unpublishably alone in the present, and develops an anachronistic bond with the imagined readers, scholars, and subjects of the future.” 61 In addition to Maurice, published posthumously in 1971, Forster’s broadcasts hold the possibility of a reframing of Forster’s engagements, not only in his  own moment but also—as Micir and Dinshaw suggest—with later readers. Rather than Forster’s queer archive working in isolation from his advocacy for writers of color, it is clear that for him the two were intertwined. Forster extended the same care to his Indian colleagues as he did to his English ones. He is remembered as a witness for the defense in two highly publicized obscenity trials—for Radclyffe Hall’s Well of Loneliness and D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover—but he unobtrusively aided his Indian colleagues in navigating existing restrictions as well.62 Forster’s commitment to freedom for writers is an important but overlooked aspect of his support for Mulk Raj Anand’s novel Untouchable, which publishers considered aptly titled until Forster agreed to write a preface.63 Forster employs the occasion to highlight that A Passage to India included discussion of latrines as well, and—though at least one reader found this objectionable— the novel was not censored. Forster was instrumental in getting the censor to pass Ahmed Ali’s Twilight in Delhi, and he also privately defended Raja Rao’s work to a potential publisher who feared Rao’s work might be subjected to censorship.64 The BBC’s Eastern Service was a much more public site where Forster pushed these boundaries, discussing the work of four preeminent Indian writers in English (Anand, Ali, Rao, and R. K. Narayan) on June 9, 1941, even though some of their works were banned in India. Anand, Ali, and Rao were all known for sympathetically portraying anticolonial resistance even though their individual works suffered different fates, with some (but not all) of Anand’s novels restricted, for example. When Forster was aware that certain works were banned (and mention of them likely to trigger the censor at the BBC), he worked with his colleagues to circumvent the restrictions. For example, when Orwell warned that K. S. Shelvankar’s The Problem of India was banned, Foster instead approvingly mentioned Shelvankar’s article in Indian Writing.65

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The support Forster provided to Indian writers extended to serious critical consideration of their work that described their use of Western literary forms and the English language as “valuable work” (BBC, 185). Forster makes much of the increasing speed with which books cross borders, which allowed artists to see and respond to what their contemporaries were doing across the globe. His fellow Eastern Service broadcaster T. S. Eliot was immensely popular in India, for example. Of Bharati Sarabhai’s play The Well of the People, Forster comments: “This is an attempt to combine ancient Indian tradition with contemporary Indian troubles, political and economic, and to present the whole in a western literary form” (BBC, 259).66 Whereas Orwell thought that Indian writing in English was merely a temporary literary anomaly, Forster is one of the earliest proponents of Indian writing in English as a distinct and valuable literature characterized by an  adoption of “western literary forms” like the novel, combination with Indian literary, religious, and philosophical traditions, and treatment of contemporary Indian issues.67 Promoting both K. R. Srinivasa Iyengar’s book—Literature and Authorship in India (1943)—and the works Iyengar studied, Some Books was a humble but surprising contributor to a growing movement to claim English as an Indian language.68 The wide-ranging coverage of Some Books allowed Forster to build connections between writers and literary innovations coming from different parts of the empire, which emerges in a broadcast dedicated to James Joyce.69 That he should dedicate an entire broadcast to an artist that he admits he “do[es]n’t really take to,” whose work is both “obscure and uncompromising,” may at first glance be rather surprising (BBC, 283). One of the most frequently invoked themes throughout Forster’s broadcasts, however, is precisely the importance of patience and thoughtful engagement with what one does not immediately understand or appreciate. Forster admits to his own struggles with Joyce, adding that “comments about him are usually abusive” (BBC, 286). Nevertheless, he urges patience because “Joyce managed to build up something that was unique, something which represents our troubled age more than our age likes to confess . . . it expresses our inmost writhings with an appropriateness that achieves beauty” (BBC, 285). Despite the obscurity of Joyce’s language, he is nonetheless representative of the age for Forster as a cosmopolitan, exiled writer whose hybrid language points to the combination of traditions that Forster commends wherever he finds it.

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The talk, for Forster, was a means of instantiating a reading public. Forster’s broadcast on Joyce exemplifies Forster’s self-positioning as an amateur; the talk is not framed as a criticism of Joyce’s work but rather an opportunity to hand on a tip to encourage potential readers, not to mention writers who struggled with many of the same issues as Joyce.70 As Forster explains: “The tip is that Joyce was an exile. . . . He deliberately abandoned his triple heritage of a country, a religion, and a language” (BBC, 284). If Forster’s listeners are largely composed of the native elite, many of whom were educated in (or had at least traveled to) England or Europe, they may view Joyce’s voluntary exile with particular sympathy. Some of Forster’s fellow Eastern Service broadcasters certainly did. Mulk Raj Anand, for example, spends the first half of Conversations in Bloomsbury praising Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and attempting to track down a copy of Ulysses. Rather than harping on Joyce’s stylistic experimentation, Forster focuses on Joyce’s linguistic innovation, exploring the possibilities of English as an Irish language. If Joyce’s exile is in line with the experiences of some of his listeners and coworkers, certainly the confluence of many languages in Finnegans Wake is another point of potential connection, and one that Forster acknowledges: “He was born into the use of the English language, and his earlier books are written in it. But in Ulysses he is breaking down the normal idiom of English and in Finnegans Wake the process has gone much further. Many of the words in Finnegans Wake aren’t in the dictionary at all. They are made up out of other words, and sometimes not out of English words, for he was a learned linguist” (BBC, 284). This explanation could comfort those readers struggling through Joyce’s late work, but Joyce’s combination of languages points to a larger trend in British, continental, and Indian literature that Forster’s commentary makes clear. Praising Iyengar’s Literature and Authorship in India, Forster argues: “He describes the early and rather promising impact of western culture on the East, and traces its unexpected reverberations down to the present day, when ‘India can neither do with English nor without it’ ” (BBC, 239). Forster’s attention to the creative possibilities for Indian writers in both Joyce and the English language were not just apt for his contemporaries Mulk Raj Anand and G. V. Desani but also held true for later practitioners of the Anglophone Indian novel.

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Forster balanced his aesthetic reservations with his desire to help younger writers. As a critic—especially one who claimed to stand for art for art’s sake—Forster made some surprising recommendations to his listeners.71 Despite his frequent statements that he had no interest in politics, he approvingly discussed and recommended much overtly Marxist fiction.72 For example, about Tarashankar Banerji’s novel he observes: The action of Epoch’s End takes place in Calcutta, during the tragic winter of 1942– 43. Famine and squalor and profiteering, bags of rice in the godowns, while the poor starve outside . . . the hero . . . will help to inaugurate the new age, and to overthrow the capitalism in which he almost acquiesced. It is a documentary novel with a purpose, and belongs to a class of fiction which originated in Russia and has now spread over the world. It does not reach or desire to reach a high artistic level, but it is sincere and warm-hearted. Tarashankar Banerji is a member of the Progressive Writers Association. (BBC, 358)

The review criticizes the novel insofar as it has failed “to reach a high artistic level,” but this assessment is not as dismissive as it sounds. Instead, Forster describes the politics of the novel in a sympathetic light while simultaneously drawing attention to a major failure of the British administration. More to the point, he directly contravenes an earlier MOI propaganda directive by referring to the existence of the Bengal Famine at all.73 Couching his critique of empire in the guise of an objective book review, Forster is able to support Banerji while subtly reminding his listeners of past injustices. In this sense, Forster operates on the other side of the same coin as Francis Stuart, who, in Damien Keane’s account, banked on “the selfperpetuating discrimination between ‘literary’ and ‘political’ content,” that is, his appearance behind the microphone as a literary author, to excuse the fact that he spoke for German fascist radio.74 Operating from the other side of the political spectrum but similarly paying lip service to aesthetic autonomy, Forster refers supportively to the Progressive Writers Association, a group of Indian writers organized in the 1930s to revolt against social inequality, including—explicitly—foreign rule. The group included writers that Forster discussed in numerous broadcasts, such as Ali and Anand. Furthermore, Forster not only advertised the group’s journal, Indian Writing, on air but—revealing his close relationship to members of the group—did so from proofs of the first issue.

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MEET MY FRIEND

The relatively recent availability of Forster’s broadcast scripts not only has made possible a new understanding of his role in engaging and fostering wider reading publics for modernism in the 1940s but also sheds new light on and begs a critical reassessment of Forster’s interwar writing. Forster’s investment in personal relationships, friendship, and individual liberty rather than revolutionary politics or aesthetics is precisely what makes him seem out of place in the interwar years yet simultaneously what makes him so radical. Reviewing a collection of his broadcasts, the novelist Zadie Smith argues that Forster’s reputation as “garden variety” is undeserved: “He was an Edwardian among Modernists, and yet—in matters of pacifism, class, education, and race—a progressive among conservatives.”75 Forster’s ability to establish and maintain friendships with people of different nationalities, ages, classes, and political beliefs was predicated on his openness to other points of view but also furthered and deepened his ability to see and then portray things from multiple perspectives. Unlike in the 1940s, when Forster’s interest in furthering goodwill between England and India overlapped with British wartime strategy (which informed the Eastern Service’s mission), in the 1930s the BBC and Forster offered very different accounts of empire.76 Instead of Passage rendering Forster an orientalist, as Edward Said argues, reading the novel in the context of Forster’s other interwar work allows for a more complicated picture, putting Forster’s skepticism of nationalist movements in context. This is particularly significant because Passage was Forster’s calling card to Indian listeners: the reputation of the novel as anti-imperial within Indian circles, over and above Forster’s fame, made him a desirable broadcaster. Unlike wartime propaganda, which stressed imperial unity, a “people’s war,” in the interwar years the Colonial Office attempted instead to bring attention to the economic benefits of empire while reinforcing the paternalistic image of the colonizer, justifying imperialism in the present with observations about the differences between colonized populations and those at home, though always with the view to raising the colonized people to a level where they could eventually join the Commonwealth. John Reith’s personal commitment to the monarchy and empire inspired the Colonial Office to count the BBC as a close ally, and a particularly valuable one given its wide audience.77 A standing gentleman’s agreement between the BBC

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and the Colonial Office meant that the Colonial Office had the opportunity to review news reports before they were broadcast. The BBC organized series on the empire stressing its exoticism (for example, Dark Continent, Life Among the Native Tribes, Edges of the World, Palm and Pine, and Other People’s Lives). These programs accompanied more didactic ones such as The Responsibilities of Empire and Brush Up Your Empire, as well as adaptations of imperial romances including The Green Goddess, Congo Landing, and The Poisoned Arrow.78 Citing school talks, Empire Day celebrations, and the King’s Christmas broadcast, Siân Nicholas describes the BBC as  “a  willing, even evangelical, propagandist of empire in the inter-war years.”79 Alarmed over the growth of anti-imperial movements in India and the West Indies coupled with the success of uprisings in Ireland, the Colonial Office was keen to take advantage of the airwaves to disseminate its position, sponsoring two series of talks, The Commonwealth of Nations and a series of ten talks by Reginald Coupland and H. V. Hodson from April to June 1936, entitled The British Commonwealth and Colonial Empire. Billed as a series “in which it is intended to present a picture of the British Empire, as it has evolved and as it is, and to afford an opportunity to discuss some of the most important problems connected with it,” the talks painted a rosy picture of imperial history and argued that the biggest problems were that subject peoples were simply not yet sufficiently advanced to govern themselves.80 The series combined an emphasis on the great responsibility that the British had for their subject peoples while making clear appeals to the national interest, frankly admitting to the economic benefits of empire. Hodson put it succinctly when he observed that the “White Man’s Burden . . . is also a privilege, not always without profit.”81 According to these talks, the acquisition of the empire was an almost effortless, natural process. The battles against native peoples in North America, for example, were but blips in an otherwise smooth transition wherein native people welcomed English intervention. Coupland explains: “These temperate countries were relatively empty. Their native population was generally small and weak. The ‘Redskins’ of North America were only formidable in the early days of colonization.” In other cases, areas with which the British traded simply “in one form or another . . . came under British rule. . . . A country, for example, was subjected to British rule because it was so law-less and ill-governed that trading could not prosper.” The

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tropical empire, for example, is necessary because the people there are “politically backward.”82 Barring these reasons, other areas were annexed to save them from being taken over by another, less responsible, European power. The “native peoples” were hopelessly different and were to be cared for like children and the land itself was hostile—the tropics could never be a permanent home for whites as white children could not prosper there.83 Summarizing the necessity of British tutelage, Coupland explains, “Broadly speaking, you can think of the varied inhabitants of this, the greater part of the Colonial Empire, as . . . peasants, simple, ignorant (as we use the word), and poor.”84 As Mulk Raj Anand pointed out in an earlier anecdote, Forster’s depiction of colonial subjects in A Passage to India is a far cry from the image offered by the Colonial Office, but Forster’s other interwar work—though less well known—goes much further. His interwar broadcasts, over the Home Service, critique the version of empire promoted by the Colonial Office and the BBC. In a particularly revealing review of Letters from England, he focuses on Karel ɇapek’s experience at Wembley: He feels a mixture of terror and contempt to which only his own prose can do justice. It represents to him the British Empire, minus the four hundred million coloured people who inhabit that Empire, it is a gigantic sample fair where commerce insolently usurps the throne that belongs to Man. . . . And when we look at Capek’s funny mischievous sketch of four arm-chairs, all exactly alike, all hideous, all expensive, and labeled respectively “Made in Bermudas, Made in Fiji, Made in South Africa, and Made in British Guiana,” we ask ourselves the same question that Ruskin put to our fathers, namely is this what we want from our civilization, and will these armchairs help either the men who make them or the men who sit in them, to save their souls? (Creator, 239)

Both writers find the Colonial Exhibition to be representative, but not of the vision that its creators intended.85 The idea of commercial benefit held up by the Colonial Office is here exposed as a delusion that ignores the existence of the people on which the empire is based. The colonial exhibition leaves out the one benefit Forster identifies: the possibility it opens for contact and even friendship. The chairs stand synecdochically for the false universalism pushed by the Colonial Office—everyone in the empire can be equal as long as they are equal in emulating English products, culture, and

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people, creating homogenous consumer goods that can be passed off as ethnic and exotic. Forster’s trips to India informed much of his writing and broadcasting, but he gained further influential experience in Egypt as well, where from 1915 to 1919 he volunteered for the Red Cross.86 Forster’s relationship with an Egyptian tram conductor, Mohammed el Adl, allowed him to see parts of Egypt he would otherwise have missed, but it also allowed him to personally see how British authorities treated the Egyptian people. After the war, instead of granting self-rule to Egypt, as promised, the British continued their protectorate and even cracked down more thoroughly. Mohammed was wrongly imprisoned and wrote Forster conveying his shock at the terrible conditions and the corruption of the guards.87 This experience made the already palpable injustices of the British colonial system more personal and sinister to Forster and he responded in an uncharacteristic genre: the political pamphlet. Perhaps because Forster’s The Government of Egypt (1921) was published by the Labour Research Department, rather than the Hogarth Press or Edward Arnold, it has received scant critical attention. Yet as Mohammed Shaheen points out, the pamphlet significantly alters the predominant view of Forster as apolitical.88 Forster turned conversations, correspondence, and experiences with Egyptians as well as reading in history and politics to frame this work, which comes down strongly against imperialism. In his pamphlet, Forster reviews the history of Egypt, noting that the construction of the Suez Canal, “however valuable internationally, was destined to do Egypt more harm than good” and that British troops ended a nationalist movement “which, if treated sympathetically, might have set Egypt upon the path of constitutional liberty.” Forster’s indignation is clear: “We broke promises and made mistakes both before and during the war, but the seeds of revolution were not sown until after the Armistice had been signed with Turkey. The Egyptians who had acquiesced in our Protectorate as an exceptional measure, now hoped to regularize the situation, but found that martial law was sterner than ever and that they were treated as members of a subject race.”89 In place of the high principles extolled by the Colonial Office, Forster finds racism and contempt in Egypt. The pamphlet takes pains to explain recent Egyptian history from the perspective of Egyptians rather than the British and forcefully demonstrates how the West’s false universalism is an instrument of oppression rather than liberation. Throughout

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the pamphlet, Forster stresses the secularism, moderation, and political viability of Zagloul’s nationalist movement, the draconian measures taken by the British officials, and the reasonableness of Egyptian independence. The political pamphlet was not a genre that Forster subsequently adopted, but he experimented with other outlets for his critique of imperial narratives of global development, the most significant of which is A Letter to Madan Blanchard (1931). The Letter is written to a sailor described in George Keate’s An Account of the Pelew Islands (1788), which is based on the journals and letters of Captain Henry Wilson and others aboard the Antelope, which was shipwrecked on the islands. After building a sloop to sail to China, Blanchard decided to stay on the islands, and Forster writes to ascertain “why you went native, and how you are.”90 But instead of focusing on Blanchard, the Letter tells the story of Prince Lee Boo, who returned to England with Captain Wilson. Forster’s sardonic tone captures his disgust with Lee Boo’s treatment: The Company’s plan was to educate him in England, and send him back to rule the islands for us; he was to take with him horses, dogs, cows, pigs, goats, seeds, clothes, rum, and all that makes life bearable; he was to oust Qui Bill from the succession, conquer the Artingalls with musket-fire, and reign over corpses and coconuts in a gold-laced suit. The small-pox had something to say to all that and there will be no more talk of annexation yet awhile.91

As Forster makes clear, Lee Boo was held up as a model “noble savage” and Forster’s ironic tone throughout is as much an attack on that literature as on this failure of contact to at all alter the preconceptions of the English. Lee Boo “managed to pass away without distressing the Christians or disappointing the philosophers.”92 This brief send-up of adventure literature is one of a number of ways in which Forster approached the colonial question. Clearly, friendship was a motivation behind much of Forster’s work, including his pamphlet and Letter to Madan Blanchard, which inquires to what extent the sailor was able to befriend the people of the Pelew. Perhaps because friendship brought Forster to India, he is careful to remind listeners of his own connections and of some of the benefits he received from each. Of Syed Ross Masood, to whom A Passage to India is dedicated, he says:

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Perhaps I owe more to him than to any one individual, for he shook me out of my rather narrow academic and suburban outlook, and revealed to me another way of looking at life—the Oriental, and, within the Oriental, the Moslem. He prepared me for one aspect of India. When I first came East in 1912 and visited him I made another great Indian friend. . . . Bapu Sahib revealed another aspect of India to me—the Hindu—and through it another aspect of life, and he had a deeper sense of the nobilities and the delicacies of personal intercourse than anyone whom I have ever met, whether English or Indian. (BBC, 200)

Forster not only specifically credits these friends with expanding his outlook, but he immediately demonstrates this effect by identifying the source of his own faith in personal intercourse in the figure of Bapu Sahib. This faith in personal affection and travel leading to intercultural understanding forms a major theme of Forster’s talks. Forster points out, for example, that Edward Carpenter accepted an invitation from a friend to study with a holy man and “managed to see Ceylon and India with his own eyes rather than through Imperial spectacles” (Creator, 291). Reviewing M. J. Tambimuttu’s anthology, Poetry in Wartime, Forster posits, “Mr. Tambimuttu is from Ceylon, and his own language is Tamil, but he is living in London, he is in touch with contemporary English poets. . . . To me it is a very cheering sign, for I believe that if our troubles are ever straightened out it won’t be done by business men nor by politicians . . . but by so-called impractical people, by sensitive men, by people of culture and sympathy and by artists” (Creator, 263). Forster emphasizes friendship not for its own sake but for its ability to open the possibility of cross-cultural understanding. In an influential reading of A Passage to India, Edward Said argues that Forster’s emphasis on friendship leads him to dismiss Indian nationalism. In Culture and Imperialism, for example, Said argues: “Forster’s India is so affectionately personal and so remorselessly metaphysical that his view of Indians as a nation contending for sovereignty with Britain is not politically very serious, or even respectful.”93 According to Said’s analysis, the novel in Forster’s hands can only register the crisis of empire without coming down firmly on the side of the oppressed; or, worse, in Orientalism, the novel is said to leave its readers “with a sense of the pathetic distance still  separating ‘us’ from an Orient destined to bear its foreignness as a mark of its permanent estrangement from the West.”94 Said is right that Forster  was less than enthusiastic about certain expressions of the

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independence movement, particularly in literature. But one thing that Forster’s later broadcasts and his pamphlet help us see is that Forster supported and sympathized with independence movements but also saw beyond the nation, maintaining that personal intercultural exchanges were important. Let me turn quickly to one of the most potentially damning features of the novel, its depiction of Aziz as poet.95 When Das asks Aziz for a poem for all Indians, Aziz is unable to provide one. The narrator reveals that Aziz is forced to think of the motherland even though he does not truly love it. Aziz had taken to writing poems “all on one topic—Oriental womanhood,” which, like all things feminine, the narrative dismisses. The narrator echoes Forster’s own critical interests: “In one poem—the only one funny old Godbole liked—he had skipped over the mother-land (whom he did not truly love) and gone straight to internationality.”96 These passages seem to suggest that nationalism is a flash in the pan, a comfortable and ready crutch for Aziz when he is angry. That Indian nationalism receives this representation in Forster’s novel places it in a wider orientalist tradition identified by Said. Yet read in the context of Forster’s other work, these moments scan a bit differently. Knowing that Forster was supportive of independence movements but wary of them overthrowing aesthetic and literary interests, we can see this portrayal as also envisioning and arguing for precisely the kind of secular intercultural borrowing and exchange promoted by Said. While Forster consistently stressed the power of friendship and culture, he also acknowledges the complexity of how these goals interacted with social, economic, and political forces. In Howards End (1910), for example, the efforts of the Schlegel sisters to adopt Leonard Bast, though proceeding from noble intentions, are ultimately thwarted by their failure to account for Bast’s economic situation. More specifically, it is precisely the interpenetration of private “worlds”—Bast’s appearance in the dining room of Howards End—that leads to his death. Somewhat similarly, in A Passage to India, the budding friendship between Mr. Fielding and Aziz becomes impracticable because of the many institutions that surround them. Published in 1924, the novel identifies many of the tensions that would be played out during the Second World War, from the hope for independence revealed by Aziz’s comment, “Until England is in difficulties we remain silent, but in the next European War—aha! Then is our time!,” to the reason the British felt it must be postponed, as expressed in Fielding’s question to Aziz,

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“Who do you want instead of the English? The Japanese?”97 The possibility of cross-cultural friendship is explicitly questioned early in the novel, when Aziz visits with Mahmoud Ali and Hamidullah; the collector insists that anything beyond courtesy and conversation results in disaster. Forster’s fiction, while opening the possibility of intercultural and interclass understanding, ultimately shows that such efforts are not sufficient in and of themselves. Instead, they offer a contact that must be accompanied by the transformation of human institutions.98 The conclusion of the novel drives this point home: But the horses didn’t want it—they swerved apart; the earth didn’t want it, sending up rocks through which riders must pass single file; the temples, the tank, the jail, the palace, the birds, the carrion, the Guest House, that came into view as they issued from the gap and saw Mau beneath: they didn’t want it, they said in their hundred voices, “No, not yet,” and the sky said, “No, not there.”99

On the one hand, the two men are driven apart through the voices of natural forces, “the sky” as well as man-made ones, “the temples, the tank,” and so on. At the same time, these voices are countered by those of Aziz, who wants friendship after independence, and Fielding, who wants it immediately. The conflict between so many different voices is ultimately left unresolved, “not yet” and “not there.” Amardeep Singh offers one way out of this impasse with his emphasis on semipublic, Islamic spaces in the writing of Forster. For Singh, “Forster develops a unique concept of intimacy in semipublic spaces, which might enable him to provisionally overcome the obstacles introduced by the imbalance of power between white and brown, between colonizer and colonized.”100 Although Singh identifies Forster’s use of semipublic spaces primarily within his fiction and correspondence, I would argue that the idea can be usefully applied to his broadcasts as well. In fact, Forster puts himself in a position similar to Mrs. Moore in A Passage to India when he tells his listeners in a broadcast from 1943, “I will tell you a personal experience. I was once in Cairo and I was looking into the ruined enclosure of the oldest of the Cairo mosques, the mosque of Amr. . . . As I looked there came over me an unusual sensation of peace and well being” (Creator, 272). Forster admits his reluctance to ascribe a deep spiritual meaning to his experience but also notes that many other writers have shared the sense of peace

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at this particular location. This is but one example of how he took advantage of the intimate address of broadcasting to cultivate a sense of personal connection, even as he acknowledged the physical and cultural distance between himself and his listeners. The semipublic space of broadcasting is one that Said took advantage of himself, and it is a significant point of connection between him and Forster. In the introduction to the collection of his Reith Lectures from 1993, Said reflects on his experience at the microphone as well as on previous incarnations of the series: I had heard some of them over the air—I particularly remember Toynbee’s series in 1950—as a boy growing up in the Arab world, where the BBC was a very important part of our life; even today phrases like “London said this morning” are a common refrain in the Middle East. They are always used with the assumption that “London” tells the truth. Whether this view of the BBC is only a vestige of colonialism I cannot tell, yet it is also true that in England and abroad the BBC has a position in public life enjoyed neither by government agencies like the Voice of America nor by the American networks, including CNN.101

Said’s pithy reflections on both his childhood experiences and those of contemporary listeners in the Middle East captures the success of BBC administrators in “projecting Britain” in a favorable light—the reputation for veracity and the cultivated sense of intimate address combine to impress listeners, with the BBC becoming “a very important part of our life.” The ubiquity of the BBC points to radio’s ability to take modernity’s dissolution of time and space to new heights: London becomes a familiar character in the Middle Eastern home, discoursing over breakfast—or, in Said’s case, on Sunday afternoons, as he religiously tuned in to Nights at the Opera as a child in 1940s Egypt.102 Said, in his Reith Lectures, promotes the independence of the writer and intellectual, a major theme of Some Books. RADIO PUBLIC SPHERE

Though Forster worked hard to use the wireless in the service of literature, there has always been significant suspicion of and open hostility to the institutional and financial support offered to writers by broadcasting. Cyril Connolly—who also broadcast for the Eastern Service—nonetheless

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disparaged radio work, including broadcasting in his cautionary Enemies of Promise because, though profitable, broadcasting distracted writers from producing longer works that better lent themselves to collection and republication.103 For Forster, who brought celebrity along with his insightful commentary, the wireless was particularly remunerative: “By 1941 [the] BBC was paying him twenty guineas per quarter-hour broadcast. By comparison, T. S. Eliot did not receive more than fifteen pounds for a broadcast until after 1945” (BBC, 7). The pay was good. Whether his broadcasts distracted him from producing more substantial works is difficult to determine, but Connolly’s point that producing so many short works does not necessarily lend itself to literary immortality is a good one. The Frankfurt School worried less about broadcasting’s effects on writers and more on what they perceived to be the technology’s hostility to literature and rational public debate. Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, writing in the United States during the war, argued that the Enlightenment emphasis on human freedom had been abandoned in favor of the pursuit of mastery over nature and other humans. According to their account, technology, a theoretically democratic creation of knowledge, was being used as a force of manipulation rather than discovery. As a tool of the culture industry, radio “confines itself to standardization and mass production.”104 Horkheimer and Adorno have been taken to task for ignoring the audience’s agency. Additionally, the significant differences between American and British radio complicate any direct application of the Culture Industry thesis. More applicable in this case, then, is the work of Jürgen Habermas. Writing some twenty years later, Habermas offers a more elaborate critique of the transformation of the public sphere into a “pseudo-public or shamprivate world of culture consumption.”105 Cultural broadcasts typify this transformation: At one time the commercialization of cultural goods had been the precondition for rational-critical debate. . . . Put bluntly: you had to pay for books, theater, concert, and museum, but not for the conversation about what you had read, heard, and seen and what you might completely absorb only through this conversation. Today the conversation itself is administered. Professional dialogues from the podium, panel discussions, and round table shows—the rational debate of private

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people becomes one of the production numbers of the stars in radio and television, a salable package ready for the box office.106

For Habermas, mass media are responsible not only for a decrease in reading but, more important, for a sterilization and control of public debate constituting nothing short of “a tranquilizing substitute for action.”107 In other words, for Habermas, the mass media equals mass deception.108 In one sense, Forster’s broadcasts seem open to such critique and not only because he was capitalizing on his fame in order to appear at the microphone as a professional commentator. The book review, as it is remediated by broadcasting, suffers from the effects of the larger displacement of narrative or critical thought associated with the rise of mass media and bemoaned by Walter Benjamin in “The Storyteller.” Crucial to the appeal of Forster’s talks is that he presents himself as an avid reader: a fan of literature, not an expert. Forster’s catholic selection process forced him to sometimes offer superficial summaries of books. One such account, on December  19, 1944, discusses Kumar Goshal’s The People of India, Beverly Nichols’s Verdict on India, Clive Branson’s British Soldier in India, and the caricaturist Vicky’s Nine Drawings at a rapid pace: Mr. Kumar Goshal lives in America and addresses an American public. He is well informed and writes well. He is anti-British, not interested in the Moslems, proHindu, nationalist, and favourable to Congress—to Congress in its popular and socialist aspect that’s to say. Mr. Beverly Nichols, an English journalist, is critical of the British, hostile to the Hindus, and to Congress, which he regards as a purely Hindu body, and favorable to the Moslem League and to Pakistan. He eulogizes Mr. Jinnah, whom he met, denounces Mr. Gandhi, whom he didn’t meet, is most severe on the Indian arts, and dismisses the Vina as an “off colour guitar.” Clive Branson . . . was an artist by profession, and a communist politically; what struck him in India was the poverty; anti-British, anti-Congress, and anti Muslim League too I imagine; pro-food and economic reconstruction on communist lines. With him can be classed the left-wing caricaturist, Vicky. To them, hunger not communal division is the basic problem. That should roughly indicate to you the character of these four books. (BBC, 322)

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Although this checklist style of presentation (anti-British, anti-Congress . . .) is an extreme example of simplification, Forster’s habit of dispensing with the books he reviewed in a few lines can be troublingly reductive. On the other hand, the “culture industry” strain of Frankfurt School thought has rightly been taken to task for succumbing to technological determinism and for ignoring reception. As Debra Rae Cohen and Michael Coyle put it, “So many of our truisms about broadcasting–its authoritarian cast, its monovocality—derive unexamined from Horkheimer and Adorno.”109 To simply dismiss Forster’s broadcasts as insufficiently serious or rigorous is to miss an important intervention in the history of broadcasting and empire, for Forster’s broadcasts exemplify another definition of remediation: “reform in a social or political sense.”110 In other words, the book review is seemingly transformed in these broadcasts in two important directions. First, it undergoes a transformation in which the length is measured temporally and in which the content is, generally, condensed and simplified. As we’ve seen, this particular refashioning opens the broadcasts to the critiques offered by various theorists associated with the Frankfurt School. Yet Forster’s broadcasts paradoxically fulfill Habermas’s “institutional criteria” for the Bourgeois Public Sphere: an inclusiveness in principle, the establishment of a situation wherein works originating from the people tackle subjects formerly reserved for authority figures, and the bracketing of economic and social status (though economic bracketing was more theoretical than actual—only the well-off could afford radios).111 The Empire Service was reimagined in the 1940s as a service to the native bourgeois rather than to English expatriates, and this is precisely the audience to which Forster was so adept at speaking. Forster’s wide-ranging coverage had the advantage of relativizing the official position of the Colonial Office. While Some Books may not have been a platform for explicit social critique, it certainly recognized and sought to further existing public debates concerning literature and society. Just as the Bourgeois Public Sphere is predicated on the participants’ willingness to straddle the private and public realms, so too do Forster’s broadcasts play with distance and intimacy to allow for the expression of otherwise taboo ideas. Mary Lago’s E. M. Forster: A Literary Life (1994) tapped into and extended the general consensus that “the novel is the form most readily associated with Forster’s name” by focusing on the novels, though her biography

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devotes more space than others to his broadcasts.112 The emphasis on Forster’s novels as well as his loyalty to liberal humanism, balance, friendship, and Edwardian aesthetics have contributed to his image as a faint modernist, but his radio work allows us to see a different Forster. The historical conditions of the war imbued his adherence to these same principles with a more radical cast than they bore during the interwar years. Furthermore, while Forster reluctantly agreed to work within the confines of BBC policy, he also attempted to shape the use of transnational broadcasting in the service of more equitable relationships of exchange rather than exploitation. Forster’s Eastern Service talks, in other words, attempted to present different voices and viewpoints, but this time in the service of friendship and understanding. As he argued in the New Statesman: The talks, although they may not be listened to widely, and although they may not leave much that is definite behind, do promote tolerance, which is education’s crown; they do, by their very variety, remind listeners that the world is large and the opinions in it conflicting, and they make the differences vivid and real to him because their medium is the human voice and not the printed page.113

Forster suggests, with his emphasis on the human voice, that the presence of conflicting voices, rather than postponing friendship as in A Passage to India, could now be seen as a necessary precondition to it, one that could partially be met by the genre of the broadcast talk.

Chapter Three

THE END OF EMPIRE Mulk Raj Anand’s Comparative Modernisms

Despite the seeming paradox of the wartime BBC hiring a leftist, antiimperial writer—some of whose books were banned in colonial India— Mulk Raj Anand was actually considered highly desirable for the job. As Susheila Nasta puts it, George Orwell’s and Anand’s “prominent status as well-networked public intellectuals, combined with ‘insider’ knowledge of and support for Indian freedom, was regarded as crucial in winning favour amongst nationalist Indian audiences.”1 On the advice of Z. A. Bokhari, Indian program organizer, the Eastern Service decided to appeal to the population most likely to possess shortwave radios: students and the Englishspeaking elite. Anand “shared the skeptical nationalism” of precisely this audience.2 To counter German propaganda, which stressed that the war had little to do with India, the Ministry of Information conceded that it was more important to project Britain as a source of freedom and inspire Indian listeners to counter the fascist powers than it was to further the narratives pushed by the Colonial Office during the interwar years. Anand’s radical commitments—which he was not forced to hide in his broadcasts—were thus implicitly blessed, even encouraged. Given the MOI’s blessing, it would be a stretch to claim that Anand was subverting the BBC from within. Instead, this chapter argues a narrower but still significant point: that Anand’s experience at the Eastern Service was transformative for his writing and for the literary relationship between India and the United

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Kingdom, mapping the competing pressures of media convergence and differentiation. As part of its propaganda campaign stressing the common cultural ties between London and the colonies, the February 1943 issue of London Calling, the journal of the BBC’s overseas programming, includes a small photograph amid complicated schedules of lectures, discussions, drama, music, and news (fig. 3.1). Taken the previous November, the picture features the writers George Orwell, Mulk Raj Anand, T. S. Eliot, Una Marson, Venu Chitale, M. J. Tambimuttu, Narayana Menon, and William Empson huddled around a table at 200 Oxford Street in London, discussing the influence of India on English literature for the BBC program Voice. Taking a cue from the little magazines on which it is based, Voice’s participants present a continuation of the “internally variegated” and “internationally connected” spheres typical of modernism.3 More than a mere participant, however, Anand planned the discussion with Orwell, recommended most of the works discussed, and personally arranged for copyright payments to his fellow Indian writers.4 Addressing authors and readers in India, Anand embodied a crucial aspect of Voice (and of the Eastern Service generally): its treatment of English and Indian culture not only as mutually influential but also as coeval. Appreciated at the time and subsequently for narrating the significant but uneven relationship between colony and metropole, Anand’s early novels such as Untouchable (1935) and Coolie (1936) have become touchstones in the growing critical engagement with what Jane Marcus identifies as “the presence of black and South Asian intellectuals on the cultural scene” in interwar London.5 Yet while Anand’s broadcasts and novel The Big Heart (1945), written during his BBC years, also critique imperialism, they depart from his earlier work in limning the simultaneity of Indian and English temporality, offering a rejoinder to narratives of colonial belatedness pervasive both at the time and in the present. By attending to the structures of wireless transnational networks as well as the genres transmitted over them, radio studies can aid modernist studies in forging a more nuanced narrative of the Western diffusionist model of culture.6 While the prevailing scholarly account offers a necessary corrective to the older monodirectional model of cultural exchange, the example of the BBC—and Anand’s work in particular—offers an opportunity to countenance the limits imposed by imperial functionaries, who were eager to repurpose existing literary networks as a defense of empire. In this sense,

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FIGURE 3.1. Voice, BBC Eastern Service, 1942. (Sitting, left to right) Venu Chitale, M. J. Tambimuttu, T. S. Eliot, Una Marson, Mulk Raj Anand, Christopher Pemberton, Narayana Menon; (standing, left to right) George Orwell, Nancy Parratt, William Empson. Copyright © BBC.

Anand’s work in and around the BBC provides an opportunity to unravel some of the “messy, contradictory and often unresolved elements of his competing allegiances” without ignoring his agency in navigating these contradictions, on the one hand, and the very real limits to his autonomy, on the other.7 The “impatient modernism” developed by Anand at the BBC and facilitated by the technology of shortwave radio reveals a significant shift in the relationship between literary modernism and colonial modernity: an accelerated one that nonetheless served the temporary, wartime interests of Britain. The ability of radio waves to traverse, nearly instantaneously, the vast physical distance between London and India fused with Voice’s progressive analysis of how culture “at home” was altered by the colonies. Radio’s public is constituted by the former: “The irreducible essence of radio,” argues Kate Lacey, is its “reconfiguration of the experience of time and space, and new imagined communities, rather than any aesthetic or acoustic quality.”8

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But aesthetic and acoustic qualities are central to the latter; Voice’s message (that colonial intellectuals contribute to metropolitan life) was conveyed by the ribbon microphone’s famously flat response and placement equidistant from each contributor. One of few scholars to discuss Voice, Melissa Dinsman argues that the program “sent a powerful message of equality” in that Orwell “shar[ed] the microphone with his South Asian colleagues.”9 The program’s accent on literary cooperation and mutual influence was embedded in its very DNA, with Anand collaborating with Orwell on the program. Contrary to the intentions of the BBC leadership during the interwar years, here empire broadcasting illustrates the extent to which the colonies affected London, a significant example of a larger pattern identified by Paul Rabinow, whereby “the colonies constituted a laboratory of experimentation.”10 As even a highly condensed summary of Anand’s broadcast work suggests, the Eastern Service was the site of extensive innovation in cultural programming. That the Home Service, on the other hand, jettisoned serious programming during the war in favor of light music meant that the Eastern Service was the testing ground or laboratory for the Third Programme, Britain’s postwar cultural channel.11 For instance, Anand and Orwell’s little magazine of the air, Voice, was later emulated by the Third Programme’s New Soundings (the working title of which was Third Voices).12 As one English novelist at the time grumbled, “the best literary talks” are not on the Home Service but “on the Eastern Service, audible to Indians but not to us.”13 The object of considerable pride in Britain, the Third Programme was not an autochthonous creation but rather one that drew from the strengths of the far-flung empire. The spirit of invention at the heart of the Eastern Service allowed Anand to explore, evaluate, and develop a wide range of aesthetic responses to modernity. Anand’s self-identification in one of his broadcasts as an “impatient modernist,” eager to modernize literature, cities, and social relations but unsatisfied with the pace and nature of the changes around him, posits a link between aesthetic tumult and wider forces of modernization explored throughout his broadcasting career.14 Between 1942 and his return to India in 1945, Anand wrote or broadcast over sixty programs for the Eastern Service.15 During his years as a regular contributor, he gave talks on books, participated in on-air group discussions of art and literature, modified his own short stories as well as those of other writers for broadcast, and organized two series in which he interviewed working-class people, Meet My

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Friend and A Day in My Life. His literary broadcasts demonstrate a wide transnational purview as he adapted Chinese writer Lu Xun’s “The Tragedy of Ah Q,” discussed War and Peace, and evaluated the careers of Arthur Rimbaud, Virginia Woolf, H. G. Wells, and George Bernard Shaw. Anand’s broadcasts and novel register radical—and increasingly rapid— cultural upheaval with a descriptive capacity that reveals the severely attenuated ability of hypercanonical modernism alone to illuminate the complex relays of modernity. Singling out speed and simultaneity as cornerstones of Anand’s aesthetic practice allows for an unfamiliar but significant new way to understand his intertextuality: as a means of escalating the velocity of the creation and reception of his work, extending existing conversations, and drawing the worlds of politics and aesthetics closer together. Anand’s extensive use of literary allusion and adaptation is thus at an angle to intertextuality as it is often said to operate in modernist and postcolonial texts. In The Waste Land, Eliot employed techniques of literary adaptation, allusion, and collage to portray a gulf between the greatness of the past and the confusion of the present, while also buttressing the poem’s formal radicalism with cultural capital. Helen Tiffin identifies the use of similar techniques to radically different ends in the “canonical counter-discourse” of postcolonial texts like Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, which expose and dismantle the “underlying assumptions” of a canonical British intertext.16 Anand’s extensive use of intertextuality taps into elements of both; in “London as I See It,” he places himself at the end of a series of English writers, and his reworking of previous accounts of London embodies the revisionist and critical stance identified by Tiffin. Yet Anand is also up to something different and decidedly more cooperative, drawing on his experiences collaborating on both broadcasts and a play. While Bertolt Brecht complained that radio was parasitic, imitating “every existing institution that had anything at all to do with the distribution of speech or song,” Anand put radio’s parasitism to work.17 Rather than “make it new,” Anand embraced the mélange of existing texts and genres in broadcasting, forging a role for himself as an imaginative arranger rather than a creative genius. His technique of adopting Dylan Thomas’s “Prologue to an Adventure” for “London as I See It” carries over to the novel composed during his BBC years, The Big Heart, which is an adaptation of Ernst Toller’s play Die Maschinenstürmer (1922). In both cases, Anand eschewed

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the classics to reference contemporary texts by writers he knew personally, employing the structure or scaffolding of these works to shape his content. In what follows, I first turn to Anand’s contributions to one of the Eastern Service’s most innovative programs, the literary magazine of the air, Voice. Una Marson, who read some of her poetry in one installment, drew on the program’s model when she created Caribbean Voices. Unlike the later program, which focused on the Caribbean region, Voice gathered works from around the Anglophone world. Anand’s contributions to Voice help to globalize the interpretation of the war and literature and—more important—articulate a new perception of worldwide connectedness. The following section turns to Anand’s unpublished play, India Speaks: Map of India, which employs the metaphor of the editorial board to raise awareness of the famine in Bengal, combining snippets from political speeches and news reports with dramatic enactments of the crisis in India. This play is a fascinating example of how Anand resists the limitations of the Eastern Service (where any mention of the famine was forbidden) even as he draws techniques from it, specifically the redefinition of terms that had become laden with ideological meanings during the war. Produced in excessive haste, the play borrowed from the structure of Voice—a series that was only a year old—thus signaling an investment in speed that characterized Anand’s later work; this polyphonic compositional style is the subject of the final section, which analyzes Anand’s broadcast, “London as I See It,” as well as his wartime novel, The Big Heart. LITTLE MAGAZINES AND OTHER ETHEREAL PRINT NETWORKS

The story of the importance of periodicals to the spread of modernism is central to the new modernist studies. Identifying little magazines as “the public face of modernism,” Mark Morrisson points out that far from ignoring or disdaining the masses, “modernists in this period searched for ways of rejuvenating the public sphere . . . or simply making their voices and their art prominent in the vibrant and exciting new print venues of the public sphere that the commercial culture had helped to create and sustain.”18 More recently, Eric Bulson has argued that “while we continue to think about the little magazine as a technology that made modernism in the West, we can’t ignore the fact that it was a world form, which enabled literary production in countries like India, Japan, and Argentina in the 1920s, Trinidad, Jamaica,

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and Barbados in the 1930s and ’40s, and Nigeria and Uganda in the 1950s and ’60s.”19 Far from a single technology or form, the little magazine “assumed a plurality of shapes, styles, and formats around the globe.” Yet while periodical studies has done much to recover the multiple contexts in which modernist works entered the public sphere, these insights need to be paired with a wider focus more attuned to the complexity of the twentieth-century media ecology, to include aural as well as visual texts.20 Demonstrating how these mediums were mutually constitutive and testifying to the importance of periodicals in shaping public discourse, both Voice and Anand’s play India Speaks (1943) stage interventions into the public sphere specifically by depicting editorial meetings of print publications in an oral format. Both broadcast and performance pull the curtain back from the otherwise unseen and mysterious editorial process, highlighting their status as collaborations, reflecting on how textual meaning is informed by context, and revealing the ideological battles that underpin the selection, combination, and presentation of writing to the public. Voice shared many aspects of the little magazines: it abjured advertising and did not even attempt to turn a profit, focusing instead on disseminating works that the editors considered important.21 Like many little magazines, Voice was a transnational affair, bringing together writers born in present-day Jamaica, India, Sri Lanka, the United States, and the United Kingdom to London to discuss literature for an equally cosmopolitan audience. Voice’s heterogeneity draws on and extends the tendency of little magazines to function as “social forums for writers of different genders, races, and nationalities.”22 Yet as Orwell made clear in the first installment, the “readers” of Voice would have to use their imaginations when picturing the cover and feeling the pages, because Voice was a collaborative literary magazine of the air broadcast to India on the BBC’s Eastern Service. The broadcast format had some major advantages, though, especially given the shortage of paper during wartime. (This material consideration combined with a broader “depression in the trade and demoralization in the wake of Munich,” marking the outbreak of war as “the beginning of one of the periodic mass extinctions of little magazines.”23) In contrast, Orwell was able to boast that “all it needs is a little electric power and half a dozen voices,” thus bypassing the trouble, expense, and delay of submitting content to printers, mailing copies, and collecting subscriptions.24 At the same time, especially as an English-language magazine directed via shortwave

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to India, Voice partakes in the little magazine’s traditionally circumscribed audience. Despite the many advantages Voice enjoyed over print magazines, it faced a number of serious challenges, especially in the context of the war. As Orwell explained: While we sit here talking in a more or less highbrow manner—talking about art and literature and whatnot—tens of thousands of tanks are racing across the steppes of the Don and battleships upside down are searching for one another in the wastes of the Pacific. It may seem a little dilettante to be starting a magazine concerned primarily with poetry at a moment when, quite literally, the fate of the world is being decided by bombs and bullets. (All, 459)

In Orwell’s analysis, the poetry magazine is doubly threatened by war—first that war may use necessary resources (paper), and second that it may render poetry inconsequential. In fact, the BBC Home Service took this very position during the war. Intimidated by the popularity of the Forces Program, which played light music and featured generally uplifting content, the Home Service jettisoned many of its talks as well as programs dedicated to classical music and other “high-brow” topics (this was especially true early in the war, after which the BBC came to realize that “calming talks and light entertainment might see a nation through days, even weeks, of Blitz, but hardly through [the] enforced idleness” of the “Bore War”).25 For empire radio, on the other hand, the war was counterintuitively a time of increased intellectual rigor in broadcasting, as the audience in India, for example, was thought to be almost exclusively the university-educated. And while much was being decided by “bombs and bullets,” Orwell also knew that the press, particularly radio, played a large role in determining “the fate of the world.” It was the hope of the Eastern Service that by featuring honest and rigorous discussion of culture, they could counter the shrill propaganda of the Germans and the Japanese and maintain Indian loyalty through the war. While Voice shared a number of significant features with the little magazine as a form (an inability to turn a profit, a transnational purview, and a small audience), it also drew more extensively from one in particular: Indian Writing (fig. 3.2). As I mentioned in the previous chapter, E. M. Forster reviewed an issue from proofs, and the magazine featured a number of Indian writers who worked for the Eastern Service: Anand, Ahmed Ali,

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K. S. Shelvankar, R. K. Narayan, and Cedric Dover, to name just a few. In addition to employing some of the same writers, the mission of both is so similar that it appears Orwell borrowed from Indian Writing in drawing up his introduction to Voice. The editors begin the first issue by remarking: It is, of course, possible to take the view that in times like these any form of cultural activity is irrelevant. But so to argue is to acquiesce in a tragic position created by the very forces which are working towards the degradation of human values. As Gorky observed: “Culture is more necessary in storm than in peace.” It is more necessary because it is precisely in the stormy periods of transition that it becomes imperative to maintain some sense of the continuity of human thought and endeavor, and even more, to understand the processes which lead to new cultural integrations.26

Voice was also interested in probing “new cultural integrations,” ostensibly in service to humanism, but with the added propaganda value attached to the association of this position with Britain. But while Voice only implicitly supported anti-imperialism, Indian Writing is much clearer about the role of the Indian masses, who “have so far served only as pawns for the profit of Western Imperialism.” The disjunction between the two magazines reveals much about the shape of politics at the Eastern Service. On one level, then, Orwell’s distinction between war and “art and literature and whatnot” is actually a false one—it was precisely by offering art and literature to the colonies that the BBC hoped to aid the war effort. At the same time, Orwell’s disclaimer is symptomatic of the attitude of most of the contributors to Voice, who attempted to maintain this very distinction. Allowances should be made for the “staged nature of the broadcast”: as Melba Cuddy-Keane cautions about an earlier broadcast by Leonard and Virginia Woolf, it would be wrong to assume “that its arguments transparently represent each speaker’s views.”27 As Anand realized, however, this “literary” broadcast actually involved a much franker discussion of politics than was permitted in official political debates and discussions, allowing him to demonstrate how politics inform aesthetics and vice versa in a way that the other contributors missed or ignored. In the second installment of Voice, Anand argues forcefully against claims of European exemplarity. Making his interest in intelligibility and

FIGURE 3.2. Cover of first issue of the little magazine Indian Writing.

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political commitment clearer, he proposes the inclusion of Auden’s “September 1939” as representative of a new, nonjingoistic approach to writing about war.28 As in the previous month’s installment, Anand’s peers stick with a distinction between politics and aesthetics, with William Empson declaring, “I think the younger poets who are writing now are really unpolitical.”29 Anand’s analysis couldn’t be further from Empson’s; Anand argues, “But Auden is still a political poet. That poem has what you could describe as a direct political purpose.”30 Anand’s next choice—a scene from T. E. Lawrence’s Revolt in the Desert in which Lawrence is waiting to dynamite a train—takes the conversation in a new direction. Again Empson disagrees with Anand about its importance: “Ah, that was a different war. Lawrence was engaged in a minor campaign, and it was fought for limited objects which the people fighting in it could understand. Besides, it was in the open, not in trenches. It wasn’t machine warfare, and the individual counted for something.”31 Empson insists on work that features trenches and machine warfare and represents the existential crisis faced by the individual soldier and by extension the European worldview; other battles were peripheral or “minor.” Anand’s insistence on the importance of Revolt in the Desert challenges Empson’s Eurocentrism, provincializing the position of his English interlocutor. The various battles in and for colonial possessions in Africa and Asia and accompanying independence movements were significant during World War I; they just don’t fit neatly into Empson’s view of the war as being centered physically and spiritually in Europe. Empson was not necessarily dismissive of self-determination, but his understanding of war literature is based in Europe, and by labeling the Arabic independence movement as “different” and “minor,” he participates in a larger English habit of dismissing anti-imperial struggle as a series of isolated events rather than a tradition.32 Anand was not insensitive to the horrors of trench warfare or the importance of European battles; his novel Across the Black Waters (1940) portrayed the experiences of Indian soldiers fighting in the trenches of France along with the attendant physical, emotional, and mental distress caused by this new form of warfare. As the centerpiece of a trilogy, however, the trenches of Across the Black Waters are placed in a larger frame of colonial exploitation and the Independence struggle—The Village (1939) presents the events leading to Lal Singh’s choice to enlist, and The Sword and the Sickle (1942) depicts his life after he returns to India. While life and death in the

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trenches is just as shocking and devastating to Indian soldiers as it is to their English, Scottish, and Irish comrades, it is experienced as part of Indian experience and history rather than as a temporary crisis confined to a European stage. The conclusion of the trilogy, The Sword and the Sickle, shows how the individual trials of Lal Singh mirror larger tensions and struggles in India. Despite performing heroic acts that resulted in injury and time as a prisoner-of-war, Singh is not rewarded with the land, medals, or money with which the Army lured Indian soldiers. These personal frustrations are placed in the larger context of economic recession, the flu epidemic, and the imposition of the Rowlatt Acts in the face of pre-war promises of progress towards Independence. The novels thus reveal how the personal world of Lal Singh mirrors larger events. The trilogy explores the interdependence of India and England before, during, and after the war but must do so through other places—in this case France and Germany. Anand’s contributions to Voice continue this effort to countenance the global reach of the war as well as to place it in a longer time frame. This argument is then doubled by the presence of Anand in the room with Empson, with both making their points from an equal distance from the hanging ribbon microphone in the BBC studio. Rather than shifting audioposition between speakers, by this point standard practice in radio drama, the stationary microphone here reinforces the program’s critical aesthetic. Demonstrating that not every English writer felt the same way as Empson, Orwell’s next selection, Byron’s “The Isles of Greece,” supports Anand’s efforts to establish lines of continuity between the wars, something that Anand was better able to appreciate as India still awaited independence. Orwell is able to pick up on what remained only a vague suggestion in Anand’s selection from Lawrence: “There can be an actual enthusiasm for war when it’s for some cause such as national liberation.”33 Anand’s reply, “Of course! That comes very near home nowadays,” activates a force-field of potential meaning, with Byron’s poem resonating with the independence struggle in the “home” of his listeners in India.34 Orwell’s selection is also supportive of Anand’s comparative project, showing how an English writer was influenced by events transpiring elsewhere. A letter from Anand to Orwell on November 15, 1942, establishes that the works that were included in Voice were but a small selection of proposed texts and that Anand was a proponent of thinking of “English” verse in broad terms, suggesting not

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only Indian texts translated into English but an entire episode devoted to Irish literature as well. Despite the fact that staging a new, “global” reading of the war made good propaganda to an India that felt marginalized in both world wars, Anand nonetheless provincializes Europe, disrupting an otherwise smooth dissociation of aesthetics and politics in British thought and pointing to the much larger geographic and temporal plane on which the conflict of the First World War continued to unfold. Anand was aware of and sought to highlight these global links, not only to promote his fiction but also because of events transpiring at home that continually pressed him to reconsider working for the BBC. Like Orwell, Anand was ambivalent about working for the Eastern Service, politely refusing his first offer of employment by citing his focus on the Indian independence movement. When Germany attacked the Soviet Union in 1941, however, the BBC approached Anand again, through Orwell, this time with success. As Anand soon learned, the Eastern Service was a more congenial atmosphere than he had expected. Interested in maintaining Indian loyalty during the war, the Eastern Service (particularly in its English-language literary programming) steered clear of crude propaganda; looking back at his time in the Eastern Service, Orwell reflected, “On no occasion have I been compelled to say anything on the air that I would not have said as a private individual.”35 While Anand might have agreed with this statement, he would have added that there were certainly things he was not permitted to say. A few months earlier, in spring 1942, Orwell anxiously followed the results of Stafford Cripps’s diplomatic trip to India (the Cripps Mission)—to secure official support for the war effort from the Indian Congress and Muslim League in exchange for dominion status after the war—from the initial optimism of late March, when Orwell records the hopefulness of his coworkers, to April, when he notes his own depression over the apparent failure of the mission. Orwell typically documented his impressions of the morale of the Eastern Service employees in general, but in a few entries he focuses on the pressures on Anand in particular: Anand says the morale among the exile Indians here is very low. They are still inclined to think that Japan has no evil designs on India and are all talking of a separate peace with Japan. . . . A. himself has not got these vices. He is genuinely anti-fascist, and has done violence to his feelings, and probably to his reputation,

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by backing Britain up because he recognizes that Britain is objectively on the antiFascist side. (All, 259–60)

Here Orwell expresses his frustration and depression over the failure of the Cripps Mission but also gives some indications of mutual suspicions on both sides simmering just below the spirit of cooperation at the Eastern Service. The entry is more significant for what it suggests about Anand specifically and the complex ways in which Anand and Orwell worked together to toe the line on the Eastern Service’s commitment to antifascist propaganda while also working toward Indian Independence. Orwell’s support for Anand in Voice comes after Orwell wrote, in July, a glowing review of The Sword and the Sickle in Horizon as well as a letter in May to The Times Literary Supplement “to protest against . . . some very misleading remarks” in a negative review of the novel (All, 337). As we can see, Anand wasn’t forced to hide his leftist politics in his broadcasts. Nonetheless, he did struggle with his position at the BBC, particularly when the Cripps Mission failed. These struggles form an important background to Anand’s disagreements with Empson. In fact, the day before the first installment of Voice was a particularly tense time. Orwell recorded in his diary the arrest of Nehru, Gandhi, and Abdul Kalam Azad, accompanied by mass protests and a “ghastly speech” by Leo Amery (All, 458). Even Z. A. Bokhari, who was much less political than many of the Eastern Service contributors, talked about resigning from the BBC. The first installment of Voice aired on August 11, 1942, and was dedicated largely to contemporary poetry, with the participants reading aloud from poems by Herbert Read, Dylan Thomas, and Henry Treece as well as a prose passage from Inez Holden.36 These readings were supplemented by discussion and debates over the works and the larger context from which they sprung. In addition to Orwell, discussants included Anand, Empson, and John Atkins. The examination of Dylan Thomas’s “In Memory of Ann Jones” brings out important differences between these figures. Orwell, playing devil’s advocate, opens the discussion by suggesting, “I suppose the obvious criticism is that it doesn’t mean anything. But I also doubt that it’s meant to. After all, a bird’s song doesn’t mean anything except that the bird is happy” (All, 464). Empson, who had just read the poem aloud, takes offense and argues for close, rigorous analysis in the vein of New Criticism: “Lazy people, when they are confronted with good poetry like Dylan

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Thomas’s, which they can see is good, or have been told is good, but which they won’t work at, are always saying it is Just Noise, or Purely Musical. This is nonsense. . . . That poem is full of exact meanings” (All, 464). Orwell and Empson’s exchange offers a view on debates of intentionality and the function of poetry as either beautiful distraction or a carefully constructed, precise use of language. The poem is either an airy, immaterial song or a puzzle awaiting interpretation based on identification of literary devices like alliteration, meter, or—since this is Empson after all—types of ambiguity. In neither case is the poem accessible to the common reader. Anand takes the conversation in a different direction, ignoring the discussion of the poem’s literary merits and focusing instead on its intelligibility: “But it’s also true that his poetry has become a good deal less obscure in an ordinary prose sense lately. This poem, for instance, is much more intelligible than his later work. . . . [It] has a meaning that you can grasp at first hearing” (All, 464). For Anand, “In Memory of Ann Jones” is accessible and effective, valuable insofar as it serves as a tribute to an average working-class woman who would not typically be featured in poetry. The stakes of Anand’s opposition to Empson’s viewpoint emerge more clearly in the debate over Treece’s poems. Anand describes Treece’s work as “romantic,” a reaction against the Auden-MacNeice school, which favored not only an accessible meaning but a clear political purpose as well. Empson demurs: “These distinctions seem to me all nonsense.” But Anand stands his ground; getting the last word, he points out that “periods of classicism have alternated with periods of romanticism, and the distinction has lasted so long that there must be something in it” (All, 467). Anand’s insistence on alternating periods has important effects on reading practices—examining a text’s relationship to its period necessarily involves consideration of para-, extra-, and intertextual links that shape its meaning. Empson’s hermeneutic procedure explores a text’s idiosyncrasies or uniqueness, whereas Anand’s insists on the relationship between texts at given historical moments. This context gives Anand’s contributions to Voice—namely, his insistence on discussing politics and literature together and his emphasis on non-European sites of conflict—much more gravity than Orwell somewhat disingenuously attributed to literary discussions in the first installment. The disagreements staged between Empson and Anand are symptomatic of differing worldviews, both of which need to be taken into consideration. If

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“periodicals functioned as points of reference, debate, and transmission at the heart of an internally variegated and often internationally connected counter-cultural sphere,” attending to Voice as a little magazine (even an immaterial one) restores its significance as a site of debate.37 Empson here exemplifies, with his attention to the formal elements of the poem, the New Criticism that would become widespread in universities after the war and that would marginalize writers like Anand. Anand, though not insensitive to formal elements, is more interested in understanding the poem’s social purpose, its ability to link modernism with modernity. Empson’s dismissal of the importance of the battles in the Middle East and their literary representations, their role in shaping not only that region but Britain as well, is a danger we risk repeating if we consign Anand’s radio work to the ash bin of history. At the same time, Anand’s work emphasized precisely the most pressing aspects of the moment, some of which had to—for propaganda purposes—remain coded in his BBC work. MAP OF INDIA

As Babli Sinha argues, “The limits of the Eastern Service become most apparent when juxtaposed with the broadcasters’ other work.”38 Nowhere is this more apparent than with Anand’s play, India Speaks: Map of India, which premiered at the Unity Theatre on June 18, 1943. The play directly addresses the issue of the Bengal Famine, a crisis that Anand was not permitted to discuss on the air. The Eastern Service was told the famine did not exist, but that even if it did, “war demands on shipping make diversion of transport” to address the crisis “inexpedient.”39 In light of this gag order, Anand was forced to address the crisis elsewhere, but he did so through an adaptation of his work on Voice. Anand’s play premiered alongside the recently broadcast one-act play by Randall Swingler, The Sword of the Spirit.40 The addition of a radio play alongside Anand’s was only one of many significant links between the BBC and India Speaks.41 Like Voice, Anand’s play stages an intervention in the public sphere by depicting the meeting of an editorial board for a print publication. Though the editors in India Speaks are preparing a special supplement for a newspaper as opposed to a literary magazine, the framework is still used didactically. It too emphasizes global connectivity, not only by arguing that Indian Independence could bolster the English war effort and

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showing how allocations of food for the war were creating starvation in India, but also through its visual presentation, bringing together scenes from England and India onto the same stage. While representing this dialogical relationship, the play also explodes the simple dichotomy between the two, drawing from theatrical practices in the United States, Germany, and the Soviet Union. At the same time, the play has been consistently overlooked. Never published, a script is housed in the Unity Theatre Archive in the Victoria & Albert Museum, though—unlike many other Unity productions—no photographs appear to be extant. Interesting as an oddity in Anand’s oeuvre—it seems to be his only play—India Speaks reveals how Anand combined texts to form new ones, juggling a commitment to documentary practices and engaging in collaborative productions and polyphony as well. Written in response to the 1943–1944 famine in West Bengal and staged well before the famine subsided, the play enjoyed a short run at Unity Theatre in Goldington Street and—like many of Unity’s productions—was also taken on the road. The production was so successful that Unity performed it in Birmingham, Leeds, and Cardiff as well as before Indian sailors in the East End.42 One special performance for the India League featuring a speech by Krishna Menon, who helped Allen Lane establish Penguin Books, raised £2,500 for the cause. A later Unity production penned by Anand, Famine, was performed by the Army Bureau of Current Affairs Play Unit throughout that same year. Anand’s association with Unity illustrates the extent to which he was integrated into the lives of the English working class after the General Strike. The Unity Theatre was an amateur, volunteer theater by workers and for workers. Opened in 1936, it became increasingly popular through the late 1930s and early 1940s. Though catering primarily to workers, Unity attracted a wider audience thanks to a number of well-received productions. It had its first hit with the Christmas pantomime Babes in the Wood (1938), which used a combination of song and pantomime to lampoon Chamberlain (the evil uncle), Fleet Street (Fairy Wish-fulfilment), and Hitler and Mussolini (the two robbers). The play ran for twenty-seven weeks, spurred two  singles on Decca, and more than doubled membership from 3,500 to  8,000. Labour MPs Stafford Cripps and D. N. Pritt attended, as did Winston Churchill’s son-in-law, Duncan Sandys. Unity was the first theater in Britain to stage a play by Bertolt Brecht, premiering Señora Carrars

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Rifles in 1938 as well as Sean O’Casey’s The Star Turns Red (1940). Paul Robeson turned down offers from other theaters to appear in a staging of  Plant in the Sun in 1939, prompting a broadcast on Unity by Harold Nicolson and drawing a number of MPs and Jawaharlal Nehru to the audience.43 Despite this success, Unity remained an amateur theater, with the cast for most productions listed anonymously in case a late shift or some other mishap required a last-minute replacement. As such it lacked the prestige and budget of more established, professional theaters, but this also meant that Unity was not subject to the Lord Chamberlain’s vigorous censorship, allowing it to tackle social issues largely ignored by the bourgeois theaters. One Unity pamphlet went so far as to boast, “We are the first theatre to attack the war policy of a government in war time since Euripides.”44 Unity also benefited financially by the closing of established theaters during the Blitz, attracting playgoers accustomed to the West End theaters. Beyond its working-class politics, Unity in the 1940s made a good home for Anand aesthetically. In the context of the rise of fascism on the continent and the party’s switch to a Popular Front strategy, Unity Theatre’s focus on promoting solidarity among workers meant that it eschewed the earlier, aesthetically radical agitprop techniques of various revolutionary theater groups like the Workers’ Theatre Movement. Anand’s play draws from Unity’s prior Living Newspapers, Busmen (1938), an account of a failed strike by bus workers, and Crisis (1938), which reported (within twenty-four hours) on the meeting between Chamberlain and Hitler on Czechoslovakia. As the Crisis pamphlet explains: There was, of course, no “ready-made” play available and it was decided that a special “Living Newspaper” must be written and produced within two days. The first rough version was completed in one session of twenty-four hours, and produced in even less time. Writers and actors, though they had to be at work the next day, worked all through the night on the production, and on the day that Chamberlain flew to Munich, the show went on, the actors largely reading from script.45

The documentary impulse of the Living Newspaper was familiar to Anand, whose novels and stories were often praised for their realism. Furthermore, the kind of harried writing and production of Crisis is evident in the extant script of India Speaks, which, while complete, seems to be an early copy—a

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note at the end states that “lantern slides are not according to script,” and some of the speeches are handwritten (14). The turn away from agitprop techniques and toward documentary did not, however, mean a straightforward adoption of naturalism. Instead, Unity productions supplemented the inspiration they drew from Henrik Ibsen, G. B. Shaw, and American documentary theater practices (like the Living Newspaper format) with aspects of German Expressionism and Soviet theater. For instance, the director André van Gyseghem made a trip to study Soviet theater and reported back to Unity. But while Soviet theater was an inspiration to Unity, Anand meshed the documentary approach with German Expressionism influenced by Ernst Toller. India Speaks is based on a series of juxtapositions. It employs speeches and figures reported in print and contrasts these with depictions of events on the ground. The play is presented as a meeting of the editorial board of a newspaper publication preparing a “special supplement” on the food shortage in India (1). The newspaper office is represented by the Editor, who has assembled a staff of “experts,” an Assistant Editor, and a Woman Correspondent, who are also “representatives” of “the hungry millions of India” (2). As such, the journalist characters concretize some of Anand’s desires both to report back to India via the BBC and to represent Indian interests in imperial Britain. Utilizing the “intimate style” of radio drama, both characters are physically proximate to the audience. This proximity, as Neil Verma writes, is then leveraged to bring distant suffering closer to the audience: “In these cases, we sympathize with a ‘near’ character with whom we have positional intimacy so that we might empathize with ‘furtheroff’ characters in distress and privation.”46 Attesting to the complex media ecology of the time, this effect was inspired by documentary realism, a genre with which Anand was more familiar. Anand’s colleague at the Eastern Service Venu Chitale (whose work I discuss in chapter 4) wrote a feature and makes much more extensive use of both the intimate and kaleidosonic styles. Nonetheless, in a play by a regular broadcaster, presented alongside a radio play, Anand’s use of this technique is particularly striking. The play supplements the elements Anand imported through radio drama; taking advantage of the affordances of the dramatic medium, the play makes extensive use of visual elements. The Stage Manager, who the script indicates should be placed and lit “as if he were a projection of their

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brains,” plays “the voice of history” as well as serving as “a ray of revolution bringing to you the wisdom of the years as well as living, hot news, by cable, wireless and tape machine” (2, 3). Additional visual elements include projected lantern slides that show maps, charts, posters, and photographs. These are then accompanied by scenes in England and India acted out in different parts of the stage.47 Bringing India and England onto the same stage and cross-cutting between them, the play represents the two existing in the same present moment. Whereas the later “world-shaped novel” described by Rebecca Walkowitz samples from various global locations to convey contemporaneity in a global frame, Anand’s play restricts its geography to colony and metropole. Nonetheless, the play is halfway between multistrand modernist novels (which, like Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, “distribute their characters within cities and nations”) and twenty-first century novels “that distribute narrative action across several continents.” 48 The play’s juxtaposition of scenes from both locations is a departure for Anand: the agents of empire in Untouchable and Coolie are already in India, and the trilogy’s European scenes require the presence of Lalu. Crosscutting to convey simultaneity may have been well established in the language of cinema by the 1940s, but its use in India Speaks is a first in Anand’s oeuvre. The play frames the problem of widespread famine for its London audience, imparting background information and then reinforcing this by acting out various scenes of suffering or British hypocrisy. As the Announcer points out, the public may have learned some geography from reading the press, “but there still seems to be a blind spot in Fleet Street—India. Hardly any news comes from that country” (1). As its title suggests, India Speaks is an attempt to grant the common people of India an audience in England; the Woman Correspondent claims: “You shall hear the echoes of my country’s songs, the sound of its heart beats. The music of its anguish and pain” (2). This pain is presented in a series of tableaux: striking workers attacked by police; the arrest of Gandhi, Nehru, and Azad; a crowd waiting impatiently in a grain-shop queue; and rioters sentenced in court. The mediation of the Woman Correspondent is crucial to the translation of these scenes from mere spectacles of poverty and oppression to opportunities for the audience to identify with the people as individuals. These tableaux are juxtaposed with scenes of Anglo-Indian extravagance or ignorance, the club sections of A Passage to India stretched further over

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the frame of melodrama. In one scene at an English club, the British are portrayed as completely out of touch with conditions on the ground: 1st Woman: My dear, I am simply famished! Male Partner: Let me get you something, darling. Some sandwiches? 1st Woman: I would love an ice. 2nd Woman: Go on, make a pig of yourself, George! What luscious things they have! Ooh, and the champagne! (9)

The dialogue employs an ironic use of “famished” to highlight the disconnect between conditions in and out of the club, but India Speaks is not a condemnation of the British tout court. An English soldier who walked into the town by his barracks writes home (in the same prose style as the Indian correspondents): “You know that Calcutta is being bombed. But did you know that an acute shortage of food is raging throughout Bengal. In this rice-producing province there is practically no rice. There is a coal crisis in Calcutta. Food queues are everywhere. . . . Such is the mass basis prepared by Linlithgow & Co for our armies to win in Burma” (7). Reinforcing the message of the play, this common soldier has come to this realization after leaving his barracks and seeing conditions first-hand. As part of the play’s didactic structure, he models the process of discovery that the play hopes to create in the audience. Yet the play also shows dissent within the higher ranks. In another English club scene, officers debate not only the existence of famine but cooperation with Indian leaders as well: 1st  Off: I think it is the limit. The Statesman says that ‘the Govt. is throwing India from the frying pan of hunger into the fire of revolution.’ I think that takes the cake! . . . 2nd Off: There may be something in that. I feel— . . . after all, food is very scarce. 3rd  Off: Strength doesn’t necessarily mean woodenness. We ought to realize that there is a famine. The question is whether we can relieve it with the help of . . . their leaders . . . we ought to . . . 1st  Off: (Rising in anger) But my dear Sir, look at the roads we have built, the railways, the telephones. Damn it, we have made famine impossible! (11)

Here the audience is confronted with the repetition of a mantra as ineffectual denial. What is fascinating about this exchange, however, is less its

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diagnosis of the disparity between pat political phrases and reality than its complete agreement with the official talking points urged by the India Office on the Eastern Service, which denied both the existence of the famine and—in the infallible logic of imperialism—the ability to do anything to address it.49 Breaking any remaining suspension of disbelief, like most Unity productions, India Speaks ends with a direct appeal to the audience, with the Editor pleading, “Only the hungry know the sweetness of honey and bread. But my voice is only the reververation of your own intimate experience. For you too, you and you and you, have known the world which could have become a vast storehouse of plenty was made into a vast poor house of disintegrating humanity” (14). And while the play includes many of the themes present in Anand’s novels, it uses the medium of the theater to personalize otherwise elusive statistics, by confronting the audience head-on with Indian actors after opening with statistics about peasant diets in Bengal and radically dissimilar life expectancies in India and England. Second, Anand draws on his experience forging propaganda for the Eastern Service, though here the techniques are marshaled for opposing empire. Just a year before his play, Anand discussed the etymology and use of keywords in the program Through Eastern Eyes: New Weapons of War (1942). This series included episodes dedicated to the terms “Fifth Column” (March  15), “Lebensraum—Living Space” (March  22), “New Order” (March 29), “Pluto-democracy” (April 5), and “Propaganda” (April 12).50 Like Anand’s broadcasts on keywords, India Speaks reveals the ideological basis behind words. In one scene the editors unpack the definition of the keyword frequently invoked in press coverage, “looting”: Woman Corres.: Who are the looters. Editor: Looting is an ugly word—but names of themselves do not alter facts. Assist. Ed.: A hungry crowd raiding a food store ‘loots.’ Woman Corres.: When a woman steals a loaf of bread to feed her dear ones, that is also presumably ‘looting!’ (10–11)

This short exchange is representative of the play’s attempt to spur critical thinking in the audience, but it does so through a counterpropaganda technique Anand mastered on the air. India Speaks is not a thinly veiled radio play, a genre Anand had no experience writing. But in that it clearly

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draws techniques from his radio work, the play serves as an example of the simultaneous and unstable process of media convergence and differentiation in the period. AIRING COUNTERDISCOURSE

The Big Heart, published in 1945, closes with an inscription marking its provenance, “St. George’s Mews, N. W. 1,” where Anand lived during the war and where he wrote his BBC scripts before posting them to Broadcasting House. The novel is dedicated to Anand’s friend and fellow Eastern Service broadcaster Hsiao Ch’ien, whose broadcast “China’s Literary Revolution” was published alongside Anand’s “Open Letter to a Chinese Guerrilla” in Talking to India (1943). But beyond these paratextual cues, the novel gestures toward Anand’s broadcasts in a number of important ways. The villain Satyapal listens to Berlin-based Azad Hind, or Free India, Radio, the channel that the BBC’s Eastern Service was established to counter. The Big Heart reuses some of the language and imagery of Anand’s broadcasts, referring to the clock tower as “the new god, Time,” echoing the same sentiment in one of Anand’s last BBC broadcasts, “London as I See It.” But beyond topical references and paratextual cues, both the novel and Anand’s broadcasts articulate a newly globalized present. As we can see, there are important links within Anand’s corpus from this period beyond the financial support that broadcasting provided, enabling Anand to be a full-time writer. Both The Big Heart and “London as I See It” are reworkings of previous texts, and this literary indebtedness gestures to Anand’s larger project of embracing modernity while rejecting imperial domination and economic inequality. Anand’s goal is a complete repudiation of a return to the past; arguing against Gandhi’s native revivalism and call to luddism, Anand’s work supports a turn to technology and industry. He calls, too, for joining larger, worldwide socialist movements rather than returning to or maintaining traditional practices. Anand uses intertextuality extensively and powerfully in a broadcast in the series “London as I See It” on February 14, 1945. Though the series was meant to capture what was assumed to be a bewildering first impression of the imperial metropolis, he turns this assumption on its head by underscoring that an unmediated experience of London was impossible for colonial subjects. In this sense, the broadcast is a significant precursor to a series of

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“voyage in” novels: Samuel Selvon’s Moses trilogy, V. S. Naipaul’s Mimic Men, and George Lamming’s The Emigrants. Having delineated in his earlier novels how Western subjects approach the East with Orientalist spectacles, Anand cleverly inverts the process here through the depiction of an impossible search for the fabled London as a center of progress. Instead of finding the city a beacon of light, Anand’s speaker is disappointed to witness agonizing poverty, pollution, and decay. Intertextuality is thus central to Anand’s critique, which functions simultaneously on two levels: the attention to the subjectiveness of the speaker’s description is a fillip to the supposed objectivity of the Western gaze, and the inclusion of distasteful and unseemly elements is a response to the rosy depictions of England offered by the imperialists. Anand’s extensive use of literary allusion highlights the simultaneous existence of modern and premodern structures in London, reinforcing his message that both England and India were examples of incomplete modernization. The broadcast is one of Anand’s more impressionistic, fusing his penchant for social critique with his interest in and engagement with modernist literature. It was meant to capture Anand’s reflections on living through the Blitz, but this frame allows Anand to play the foreign critic (in the tradition of Montesquieu’s Persian Letters or Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels) and the dandy observer in the tradition of Baudelaire and Rimbaud.51 Like his later work Conversations in Bloomsbury, the broadcast allows Anand to explore his position in London as both colonial outsider and literary insider. While Conversations in Bloomsbury largely recounts and critiques the complicity of London’s supposedly forward-thinking writers and intellectuals with the country’s imperial agenda, “London as I See it” offers a more depersonalized, sweeping view of the city itself. At the same time, the broadcast still manages to point to the hypocrisy of the imperial purview—the squalor of the East End and the Embankment giving the lie to Britain’s supposed wealth, moral superiority, and organization. The broadcast posits Anand’s experience as an exploration of the preconceptions with which he arrived. Contrary to expectation, the “taxi driver was friendly” and “it was not drizzling, as people say it always drizzles in London” (1). After a brief spell of alienation, Anand explains: Later, however, I discovered London. I saw the rows of simple, straightforward Georgian houses. I walked along the beautiful squares of Bloomsbury, and I looked

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at St. Paul’s and other buildings which owe their existence to the genius of Wren. I learnt to appreciate the beauty of the soft graded colouring of the London atmosphere which appears in all its nuances in Victor Pasmore’s pictures. I could understand even the genteel shabbiness of London’s lower middle class through the irony and pathos presented in the paintings of Walter Sickert. (1)

Between the colors of Pasmore and the “irony and pathos” of Walter Sickert, Anand’s London was not one of modernity’s supposed shocks but rather one already thoroughly processed.52 Thus Anand was able to make “associations of time and place with the names of the greatest sons of England, Shakespeare, Johnson, Shelley, Byron, Thackeray and Dickens” (2). This list scores a propaganda point for gesturing to the “universality” of British culture, but it simultaneously puts Anand at the end, suggesting that he is the culmination of this literary development. In other words, like so much of the broadcast, this claim reaffirms the attachment of colonial subjects to the mother country while also claiming a position from which to critique it. The swift accumulation of literary references is symptomatic, too, of the way in which almost all Anand’s observations are mediated through art; London as he saw it was a London glimpsed through the paintings and writings of others. But while the broadcast is partially a story of enchantment, identification, and belonging, it also expresses a deep disillusionment following the realization that the idea of progress pushed by imperialism was elusive at home. After a brief, favorable mention of Westminster Cathedral and St. John’s, Anand turns to the seedier side of London life, from the Embankment, “a kind of dung heap on which all the bleary, worm-eaten tramps and downs and outs festered like the sores on England’s fair names” to the prostitutes lurking “in the shadows of the side streets . . . Demi-mondaines with an unnatural piercing glint in their eyes, night creatures with hard, hollow features, thinly coated with preservatives” (2). If the colonized are often feminized in colonial discourse, Anand returns the compliment with a vengeance, relishing—like Baudelaire—the dark underside of the metropolis.53 While Anand quickly—at the end of his talk—salutes the bravery of Londoners during the Blitz, he uses most of his time to convey his disappointment at arriving in a London that was “old,” “dead,” and “decrepit.” Explaining that he was an “impatient modernist,” Anand asks, “Why hadn’t they realized the true spirit of the machine age more intensely, rid their

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towns of the smoke by the use of electricity, built functional houses, offices, theatres, and public buildings?” (2). The London of the Colonial Office is, for Anand, nowhere to be seen. Texts and writers not mentioned in the broadcast loom large as well, including T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal, and Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. None of these texts, however, has as much influence on “London as I See It” as the work of another Eastern Service broadcaster who shared Anand’s ambivalent feelings about his experience in London, Dylan Thomas. “London as I See It” forms a conversation with Thomas’s early prose experiment, “Prologue to an Adventure,” which recounts in densely symbolic language a young man’s difficulty adjusting to London after leaving Wales. Thomas’s opening, “As I walked through the wilderness of this world, as I walked through the wilderness, as I walked through the city with the loud electric faces,” is simplified in Anand’s hands to “As I walk along, as I walk along the streets and lanes of London . . . as I walk along the streets of London.”54 Both pieces are concerned with similar characters—policemen, toughs, and ragged women— and similar locales: taverns, cathedrals, and dark streets. Thomas’s speaker critiques “they who were hurrying . . . time bound to their wrists . . . who consulted the time strapped to a holy tower,” and Anand notes the constructed nature of time: “I walk along in a time manufactured by the Home Secretary, in synthetic days and black, velvety nights.”55 In keeping with the critique of urban space as artificial, both writers emphasize the transformations wrought by electric light, with Anand singling out “the neon lights in Piccadilly Circus” (4). Yet while Anand’s broadcast shares many of the images, themes, and conclusions of “Prologue to an Adventure,” it does not use Thomas’s radical style nor point of view; rather than metaphorically accompanying the devil, as Thomas’s narrator does, Anand takes pains to separate himself from the surrounding decadence. Emphasizing this difference through diction, in contrast to Thomas’s mandarin, mellifluous prose style, Anand’s is a vision of sobriety. Anand contrasts his early impressions of London with those during and immediately following the Blitz, favoring concrete references to real people and places over Thomas’s allegorical figures, “Old Scratch,” “Daniel, Ace of Destruction,” and “Mister Dreamer.” And though Anand acknowledges his loneliness, unlike Thomas’s speaker, Anand’s never converses with any of the characters he encounters. Solipsism replaces

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interaction. The choice stems in part from Anand’s understanding of the talk genre—in order to cultivate intimacy with the listener, Anand eliminates other characters as well as the allegorical, high-literary diction of Thomas’s “Prologue,” which was written for the page. Anand speaks to the listener, not a character. There is, however, a further effect of Anand’s adoption of a more natural style—it separates Anand from “decrepit” London and Thomas’s profligacy, again contributing to a sense of intimacy with his listeners in India. Despite Anand’s restrained prose and imagery, which establish a critical distance between the speaker and the surrounding decadence utterly absent in Thomas, working in radio sharpened Anand’s attention to the sense of sound. The speaker in “London as I See It” is not only interested in the visual spectacle of the city; he is also careful to capture—like a phonograph—the urban soundscape: “I want to be happy . . .” a shrill voice imitates the soprano of Binnie Hale to the tune of a badly played piano in a pub in a mean street behind the luxury hotel and the expensive restaurants. Someone starts another song: “If you were the only girl in the world . . .” And there is ribaldry and loud laughing in the public bar, full of Londoners who have hobbled in for their usual pint, regular customers and a few stray ones. The publican cracks a joke with someone like a benign pater familias. More laughter, interspersed with talk . . . “Lily of Killarney . . .” the man at the piano hammers away, and the whole atmosphere becomes charged with his broad, ringing voice, with a kind of Dionysian spirit, the kind of abandon which is the spirit of “merrie England.” Only, soon, the publican calls out: “Time, gentlemen please, it’s time.” And there is a strain of music outside which jangles on the nerves, a melody which is being played on a broken viola by a man in tattered clothes. (4)

This scene echoes Eliot’s The Waste Land more than Thomas (especially with the inclusion of last call), but the arrangement of the sounds—unlike in Eliot—is not seemingly random but rather is in keeping with Anand’s social critique. In other words, the “pub in a mean street” is behind the “luxury hotel and the expensive restaurants” in more than one sense. Further, his narrative moves continually down the social ladder, ending with the veteran in “tattered clothes.” The scraping of the homeless veteran “jangles

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the nerves” not only because it is being played on a “broken viola” but also because it pulls the drinkers out of a state of temporary reverie. In this broadcast Anand uses sound to map out economic inequality, rendering the cacophony of urban spaces not as one of modernity’s shocks but rather as pointing to the all too familiar. One further departure from Eliot is worth lingering on here: Anand refuses to break into dialect. Whereas dialect is often used to achieve a sense of realism, it also marks the character as socially, economically, and often racially inferior to the narrator.56 In The Lonely Londoners, Selvon reverses this pattern by narrating throughout in a modified Trinidadian dialect that marks the rare instances of standard pronunciation as socially out of place. But as I explain in the epilogue, Selvon, Naipaul, and Lamming were all required not so subtly by Henry Swanzy’s commitment to “local color” to write in dialect. As Anand’s scripts reveal, there was no analogous house style at the Eastern Service: though Anand’s novels are famous for their rendering of Punjabi phrases in English, his cool viewpoint is maintained here by narrating the pub scene in the same prose style as the rest of his talk. As Anand’s critical adaptation of his coworker’s prose makes clear, he is happy to borrow from contemporary works to scaffold his own writing, a project he takes up more thoroughly in the novel composed during his employment at the BBC, The Big Heart. If Anand is impatient with modernization in London, he is equally concerned about India. Viewed from one angle, The Big Heart picks up some of the interests of Anand’s other novels, focusing on the trials and tribulations of a working-class character attempting to put into practice the socialist ideals and modernizing impulses he learns from a well-educated friend. It is concerned, too, with the clash between traditional and modern economic and social arrangements. With its setting in Amritsar among Thathiar Hindus—a class that Anand knew well, though his father had entered the military rather than become a coppersmith—the text adds autobiographical resonance to its façade of social realism. Both Anand and his critics have stressed precisely these qualities of the novel, with Anand describing “the original of Ananta” and Margaret Berry claiming that Anand’s inclusion of tension between subcastes—and even between individuals within subcastes—“renders his message more than usually realistic.”57 Anand’s experience with radio may have had minimal impact on the content of his works, but it had a huge impact compositionally. To overlook

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this change is to miss precisely how he was an impatient modernist. The Big Heart is unique among Anand’s novels as an adaptation and remediation of another work. If The Big Heart catalogs some of the many ruptures wrought by modernization, it does so by undermining claims to authenticity and realism, exhibiting a new author function in which the author is, like a factory worker, a playwright, or a broadcaster, one small part in a much larger production. To understand how the novel performs this reversal, however, it will be useful to point out how and why it has so far been misrecognized as an example of social realism. Part of the reason is extratextual—Anand’s participation in the All-India Progressive Writers Association (whose manifesto calls for social realism) as well as his own statements that he was attempting to bring this kind of writing to India. Writing to his biographer, Anand explains: “If the seamy side of life had to be written about, then there it was and must be exposed. Never mind if Gorky had already done it for Russia, Zola in France and Dickens in England. In India it had not been done.”58 At the same time, many formal elements of the novel itself are in keeping with realist fiction—from third-person omniscient narration, to infrequent narratorial intervention, to its emphasis on the details of everyday, contemporary life. Certainly in its depiction of the working-class Ananta as a hero- (if not Christ-) figure, its frank depiction of poor working conditions and widespread poverty and suffering, struggle to organize labor, and consistent style, the novel outwardly conforms to the genre. From this perspective, the story of the protagonist, Ananta, seems plausible. Ananta is a coppersmith of the Thathiar caste recently returned to his birthplace in Amritsar. After organizing unions in Bombay and Ahmedabad, he attempts to channel the anger and anxiety of his fellow metalworkers, who had recently lost work when a few local families opened a factory.59 Ananta pleads for the establishment of a union and—like the BBC’s Eastern Service in general, but certainly all of Anand’s broadcasts— the general principles of patience, reason, and internationalism. The workers alternate between following Ananta and a more violent nationalism advocated by the student Satyapal, who, taking his cues from Fascist radio, argues for the immediate destruction of the factory and a rejection of technological modernity. At the conclusion of the novel, Satyapal wins the men to his side and convinces the workers to smash the machines in the factory. Ananta, who pleads with his friends to stop, is killed by his

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old drinking-mate Ralia, Ananta’s head—the seat of reason—smashed against a machine. Part of the realism of the novel stems from references to real people and events. These include a host of historical allusions including references to Gandhi’s opposition to machinery, references to the Second World War including planes, “that engine of destruction, the bird of steel, which excretes bombs and urinates bullets,” and alliances, with the poet Purun Singh arguing that “the Sarkar may be oppressing us, but the people of Vilayat are the friends of the peoples of Roos and Chin, and on the side of truth against falsehood.”60 Like India Speaks, The Big Heart addresses dramatic increases in the price of flour and includes mob scenes outside of the grain shop (163). But over and above these historical details, the novel captures the larger ruptures that characterized the age. The opening of the novel shows how the Billimaran lane of Amritsar testifies to these changes—the Clock Tower, built by the British, stands above the new factory, the Ironmongers’ Bazar, the Booksellers’ mart, and the post office, all of which are juxtaposed with vestiges of the premodern—at the other end lies a shrine to the goddess Kali as well as the “ancient market, where the beautiful copper, brass, silver, and bronze utensils made in the lane are sold” (8). The novel explores the various effects of the clash of these two forces by tracing the movements of the characters between these two poles. As always, Anand uses the novel to critique caste divisions and prejudice. Untouchable dealt with caste inequality by highlighting the humanity of the outcastes and cataloging the injustices meted out to Bakha on a daily basis. In The Big Heart, however, caste divisions are further complicated by the new economic relationships introduced by the factory. For example, when Murli, a Thathiar, partners with members of the higher Kasera brotherhood, he attempts to ingratiate himself with his new associates and impress his soon-to-be in-laws by refusing to invite any Thathiars to his grandson’s wedding. The father of the bride, worried about the low turnout, confronts Murli about his snobbishness, asking where the Thathiar brotherhood is and threatening to call off the wedding (148–49). Murli is forced to beg his few guests to stay and complete the ceremony, pleading: “Save this ceremony. I have sinned. I have erred. You can beat my old head with your shoes. But let us have this betrothal . . . if I did not invite them it was because they felt bitter with me about the factory and the loss of their trade” (155). The conflict stemming from Murli’s attempts to use the factory

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as a means to move up the social ladder are visible in other sections of society as well, as Thathiars compete for factory positions and the few remaining commissions for handmade goods from the Kaseras. Yet the novel features an unprecedented emphasis on mood and imagery. As opposed to the sprawling narrative of the trilogy or even the openendedness of Untouchable, The Big Heart achieves dramatic effect through careful control of atmosphere and the repetition of key figures. The novel’s nightmarish setting is established early on, when Ananta recalls the previous night’s dream: [There] was a considerable crowd before him and he had begun to speak. But Janki, his mistress, had interrupted him with a wail, and as he had turned to go towards her in a garden that looked like Guru ka Bagh, the crowd had become like the masked men he had seen in the dacoit films in Bombay . . . And they were following him, while he had run, their hands dripping with blood. He had been frightened and had tried to run faster, but behind him there was a voice calling, “I am hungry! I want blood,” and he had felt almost overpowered . . . He had looked back and found a black woman with a trident in her hand standing on the cremation ground, stamping upon corpses and dancing as she shrieked again and again, “I am hungry! I want blood!” And he could hear the dead moaning under the feet of the woman, whom he soon recognized as the Goddess Kali. (12)

The dream’s sources of images, the movies and religion, encapsulate the struggle depicted in the novel between the many manifestations of tradition and modernity, while the dream itself foreshadows Ananta’s death later that day at the hands of a group of machine-wreckers. One effect of the novel’s many allusions and returns to the dream—for example, when Ananta wakes from a brief nap (in which he recalls his dream) only to see Kali depicted on the wall in front of him—is to maintain a dark, somber mood (178). The image of destruction is repeated and expounded on throughout the novel, coupled, for example, with that of circling crows, “ominous birds” that Ananta sees on his way to warn factory-owner Chaudhri Gokul Chand about the machine smashing (197). Ananta sees and discusses shadows, ghosts, and skeleton-like figures throughout, suggesting Expressionism more than social realism. By the hygiene of style and historical references, the novel outwardly conforms to the expectations of social realism. This is complicated,

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however, by the emphasis on a nightmarish mood that seems more in keeping with Expressionism as well as by the narrator’s warnings about notions of purity and unmediated access to “truth.” The “age of truth” is always invoked in scare quotes and further questioned, as in the reference to “the pure, holy water (if it ever was pure?) of the ceremonies of the ‘age of truth,’ ” with the narrator sardonically adding “whenever that may have been” (7). More than documenting the exhaustion of living and working in a period infused with propaganda, since the novel otherwise takes up and continues some of the talking points for the Eastern Service, the articulation of a break from the “age of truth” warns against nostalgia because the novel—though set in the present—borrows so extensively from the literary past. This is precisely where the novel as adaptation is so important—The Big Heart’s preface pulls in two directions. Opening with an excerpt from Lord Byron’s speech on the Luddites to the House of Lords, the novel uses England as a historical parallel, with Anand as author reinforcing the point when he adds, “Although human conditions have much changed since Lord Byron thus spoke in the House of Lords this quotation is given here because it still might have some relevance to our time” (6). Over and above the novel’s negative depiction of Azad Hind Radio, this argument is of a piece with Eastern Service propaganda talking points, with British culture presented as both universal and working toward freedom. Ananta further buttresses this connection, arguing later in the novel that local workers should organize like their English counterparts did. At the same time, the inclusion of Byron’s speech, which seems to fill a documentary purpose and to work at cross-purposes with the Expressionist elements of the novel, is actually the first of many obvious parallels with Toller’s Die Maschinenstürmer (translated by Ashley Dukes and published and performed in London in 1923 as The Machine-Wreckers), which opens with a translation and adaptation of Byron’s speech in verse.61 Toller, an acquaintance of Anand’s, was widely known for his Expressionist plays and radical politics. He was imprisoned after leading the Bavarian Soviet Republic, and his Die Wandlung (1919) was released to widespread renown while he was in prison. He also wrote other plays and a collection of poems while confined. Stripped of his citizenship by the Nazi Party, Toller had a warm reception in England: Requiem was performed regularly by the Unity Theatre; Stephen Spender translated Pastor Hall,

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which was published in 1939 and filmed by the Boulting brothers in 1940; Auden translated and adapted the songs from No More Peace; and— testifying to Toller’s importance at the time—Auden’s “In Memory of Ernst Toller” was one of three elegies published in Another Time, alongside memorials to W. B. Yeats and Sigmund Freud.62 Flying in the face of its otherwise realist commitments, the characters and plot of The Big Heart are directly derived from Toller’s play. Ananta is based on Jimmy Cobbett, who—like Ananta—is friendly with the local children, recently returned home after working for unions in other cities, manages to talk the workers out of violence by spreading the idea of trade unionism, is mistakenly believed to be secretly in the pay of the factory owners, debates passionately with another organizer who preaches violence, is killed in a frenzy of machine smashing, and in death makes the workers realize their mistake. The martyrdom of both protagonists is prefigured through religious imagery: Cobbett is referred to as a “colonel of a regiment of angels,” a “new prophet,” and is given a crown of straw; Ananta’s death is foreshadowed in his dream of Kali. In both cases, the impending death is figured as the sound of marching, with the Beggar in The Machine-Wreckers “imitating the sound of marching men,” yelling “Tramp, tramp, tramp, tramp!” 63 Similarly, Ananta is haunted by Kali’s stomping. Even minor moments are taken from the play, such as when Ananta attempts to give bread to begging children and they fight over it.64 Satyapal is modeled on John Wibley, who seeks to steal Jimmy Cobbet’s power over the workers by advocating violence, arguing “we must have deeds, not words!” 65 Jimmy’s response to Wibley, “One would think you had no wish to free them, but only to revenge yourself,” is echoed and extended by Ananta in his responses to Satyapal as well as by the narrator: How much the violent insurrectionism he was preaching derived from his impatience to change India overnight by a bloody revolution, and how much of it arose from the striving for power that was the outer curve of an inner corrosion through his intense sensitiveness to British insults, no one could resolve. For though vanity, pride and the flamboyant manner had appeared in him, he had not yet revealed that utter contempt for the people which accompanies the desire to rise, through the depreciation of others, to undreamed of heights of power. And he had certainly been misled by the “Azad Hind” Radio.66

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Wibley instructs the workers to kill Jimmy for being a traitor but does not participate himself; similarly, Satyapal urges smashing of the machines but is not himself physically involved.67 Further, Cowasjee claims that the working-title of The Big Heart was The Machine Wreckers. I mark these parallels not because they connect Anand’s work in a oneto-one relationship with an earlier work of German Expressionism but rather precisely because the citation opens on a vast network of intercultural transactions. Toller explained that his play was based on accounts of the English luddites in Friedrich Engels’s Die Lage der arbeitenden Klasse in England and Karl Marx’s Das Kapital; in addition to general descriptions of living and working conditions derived from these sources, and as N. A. Furness points out, Toller’s play renders keywords in English, for example: knobsticks, cottage, and mule.68 As we’ve seen, it opens with a scene recounting Byron’s speech in the House of Lords defending the Luddites, establishing a reference to the speech as well as Byron’s poem, “Song for the Luddites.” Furness has identified additional textual sources by examining the songs included in the play, which are translations of English Chartist verse printed in Max Beer’s Die Geschichte des Sozialismus in England (1913). Adding yet another turn of the screw, however, Beer translated one of these “English” songs from Charles Kingsley’s Alton Locke (1850), where the narrator claims his song is “the spirit-stirring marching air of the German workmen students.”69 Rather than grounding one work squarely in another, Anand’s and Toller’s catholic and widespread borrowings suggest a vast international network of appropriation and cooperation, eschewing an individual standpoint in favor of what Deleuze and Guattari call “a collective enunciation.”70 Bringing the works into closer dialogue are a number of important historical considerations. First, the two cities to which Ananta is said to have traveled, Bombay and Ahmedabad, were the capitals of India’s booming textile industry. In a recent book on Ahmedabad, the historian Howard Spodek unpacks the city’s reputation as the “Manchester of India,” arguing that the city’s ethnic and social problems rendered it a “shock city . . . on the front lines of the problems of its nation.”71 It was on the outskirts of this, the city with the most industrialized labor force in India, that Gandhi established his Sabarmati Ashram, where Anand is said to have sought Gandhi’s input on Untouchable.72 Gandhi’s role in arranging and influencing the Textile Labour Association bears an uncanny resemblance to Toller’s

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Cobbet and Anand’s Ananta, both of whom preach negotiation rather than strikes. As Spodek points out, “In 1918, Gandhi intervened in a strike and lockout in the Ahmedabad mills that threatened labor and management with great losses. He declared his first ‘fast unto death’ to force both sides to compromise.”73 Although Anand’s trilogy included an unflattering portrait of Gandhi, with Anand aligning himself more and more clearly with Nehru, Ananta’s Christ-like sacrifice had historical resonance beyond Toller. The impatience expressed in Voice, India Speaks, “London as I See It,” and The Big Heart resonates with many of Anand’s texts, but it gives a sense of urgency to the adoption of the flush toilet at the conclusion of Untouchable—rather than one option out of three (roughly Gandhism, Christianity, or technology), each of Anand’s subsequent texts suggests more and more emphatically that hope for greater economic well-being and equality resided in the spread of technological modernization.74 Comparison with Untouchable is instructive—like the earlier novel, The Big Heart was written in the tradition of the modernist Day Book, with the tolling of the town clock recalling Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, and Ananta’s canvassing on behalf of unionization, delight in the pleasures of food and drink, and treatment as outcast likening him to Leopold Bloom. But unlike Untouchable, which features a network of intertextual allusion without favoring any one text over another, The Big Heart represents a departure in that The Machine Wreckers has become the central inspiration. As adaptation, the novel is simultaneously realist novel, expressionist drama, and modernist Day Book in a manner analogous to the experience of radio as not simply polyphonic but a combination of various genres and forms existing simultaneously. AN AESTHETIC OF SPEED

Completed in 1944, as both the war and Anand’s time in London were coming to an end, The Big Heart is the most extreme example of the kind of authorship practiced by Anand during his BBC years. Just as “London as I See It” argued that there was no such thing as an unmediated view of the city, The Big Heart represents an attempt to think through modernization intertextually and in a number of genres simultaneously. Whereas “London as I See It” was based on Dylan Thomas’s prose poem, the provenance of The Big Heart is much more elaborately circuitous, challenging a neat

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geographical connection between India and England. The novel is polyphonic not only in terms of presenting many viewpoints but also in its intertextuality and is in this sense closely linked with his work at the BBC.75 Why, then, has Untouchable received so much attention and The Big Heart received so little? Part of the reason may be the persistence of values from New Criticism. As one example of the ways in which New Criticism shaped and selected objects of study, Cleanth Brooks argues against an allegorical style: “The poet does not select an abstract theme and then embellish it with concrete details. On the contrary, he must establish the details, must abide by the details, and through his realization of the details attain to whatever general meaning he can attain.”76 Brooks’s account makes Anand’s method appear backward—Anand starts with the plot, symbolism, and even the features of his characters and then changes details to transpose the setting to present-day India. Not only is Anand backward, though, but this renders his work unworthy of serious study. Ironically, a number of well-known modernist works were based on other texts—to cite just two examples, The Waste Land on the grail quest and Ulysses on the Odyssey. But Joyce’s indebtedness to Homer had to be contained; reacting to critics who emphasized the parallels between the Odyssey and Ulysses, Ezra Pound took pains to make clear that the Odyssey provided the faintest scaffolding and was ultimately unimportant; “correspondences are part of Joyce’s medievalism and are chiefly his own affair, a scaffold, a means of construction, justified by the result, and justifiable by it only.”77 Pound’s argument seeks to undo the harm to the author function performed by intertextuality—instead of undermining individuality, it is here posited as what is most idiosyncratic about Joyce, “chiefly his own affair.” What we miss, however, by ignoring later works like The Big Heart is the speed with which modernism was unfolding, such that earlier works may have returned to classical texts for their structure, but later ones turned to works written in the previous twenty years. In an essay on Joyce’s Ulysses, Franco Moretti usefully identifies a split, or failure, in the text between the stream of consciousness technique of the first half and the polyphony of the second half.78 Although Moretti is focused on the traditional “Men of 1914” brand of modernism, his insight into the shift in literary modernism from stream-of-conscious technique and focus on the subjective experience(s) of the individual and psychological interiority toward increased polyphony offers another way to think about global modernist networks without

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completely eliminating formal considerations. Anand’s works have been labeled failures for attempting to contain too much and for showing their seams—the conflict between a social realist style and the inclusion of political and philosophical arguments that are said to take up too much space, to distract from the “real” novel, and to lack an air of believability. Anand’s work is polyphonic, too, but with the addition of the fact that both “London as I See It” and The Big Heart question the individuality of the author and explode the continuum between India and England by appropriating and pointing to works from other regions. As Orwell reflected in his war diary, Anand was between two worlds, part of the Indian independence movement yet simultaneously alienated from it; he remembered later that he stayed in London during the war, where he was “made to fight for half lies against the big lies.”79 Anand’s own accounts of his experiences in Bloomsbury paint him as literary insider but also political outsider; more recently, scholarship on Anand claims him alternately as modernist or dissident realist. Rather than help place Anand firmly in one camp or another or to resolve these contradictions, his wartime work shows that a writer absorbing and retransmitting these struggles, synthesizing techniques, and repurposing the past may in some ways have been more in tune with modernity than those who created stunning, idiosyncratic products in their perpetual search for the new.

Chapter Four

INTIMATE AND KALEIDOSONIC STYLES Attia Hosain, Venu Chitale, and the Hybrid Novel

Whereas the story of the remediation of the novel and shortwave has so far suggested in the case of James Joyce that radio becomes a figure for the novel’s increasing polyphony and in the case of E. M. Forster and Mulk Raj Anand that it instantiates a new sense of contemporaneity, this chapter continues this thread while also marking a departure point, when the limitations of broadcasting contrast with those of the novel. After three decades of the mutual interpenetration of the novel and radio, some of the longstanding aspects of the novel stood out in sharper relief. Whether cast in terms of jealousy (for Fredric Jameson, “literature, or a purely literary aesthetic, suffers from a profound envy of the other arts”) or survival (Julian Murphet argues that literature’s need “to absorb material qualities from the more substantial media around it” shocked it into “sudden self-recognition as a medium”), it is clear that even while the novel absorbed some radiogenic elements, other contours of the novel simultaneously stood out as never before.1 In short, the formerly anachronistic aspects of the novel are precisely what are reinforced and celebrated here: its investment in the bourgeois individual (particularly strong in the bildungsroman) now makes it particularly effective for two writers to cast off the mantle of group identity thrust on them in their broadcasting careers. Whereas we may now argue that women’s radio programs flattened Venu Chitale’s and Attia Hosain’s experiences as individuals, the novel allowed for a more nuanced,

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detailed treatment of the individual. In this chapter it is not simply a biographical fact that these two writers abandoned careers in radio to turn to novel writing, but that this reveals something larger about the conflict between these two forms. The broadcasters I have covered so far had to work within the confines of propaganda guidelines, but these general wartime restrictions were doubled for female broadcasters by preexisting gender divides. Echoing rather than countering the propaganda of Nazi Germany, female broadcasters were largely confined to topics deemed suitable to their gender roles. In Kate Lacey’s account of German wartime broadcasts, female audiences were “catered to specifically by the regular inclusion of interviews with women and reports about women’s experiences,” as well as programs that described “the work of the women’s party organizations and the cooperation of German women in the war effort.” Radio administrators doubled down on gender roles in the face of their softening by the realities of total war, when “the home front increasingly became the front line.” In short, “despite women’s evident interest in political bulletins and the concessions made acknowledging their presence in the audience, they were most commonly addressed only in terms of their relationship to men—as wives and mothers.”2 This model was very much in place at the Eastern Service as well. In practice, this meant that while Chitale and Hosain were deployed over the Eastern Service as announcers, translators, voice actors, and participants in literary discussions, they were largely restricted to programs aimed at female audiences. For instance, Chitale translated Orwell’s news bulletins into Marathi, but the news was then read by a male announcer. While Chitale was tasked with work along the lines just outlined, interviewing fashion designer Bianca Nosca about Nosca’s wartime work and hosting series on childcare, The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, and cooking, The Kitchen in Wartime, so too was Hosain, who hosted the weekly Women’s Programme for the Pakistan Service throughout 1950.3 Whereas other chapters of this book focus on how the BBC places the colonies in the same temporality with Europe, this one shows how two novelists strategically return to and reimagine the historical novel and bildungsroman to highlight the uneven modernity faced by women. This chapter’s insistence on reading representations of the home in broadcasts and novels by Chitale and Hosain recovers their critique of the demotion of women’s rights in the nationalist movement, in the studios of the BBC,

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FIGURE 4.1. Attia Hosain acting in an adaptation of Antony and Cleopatra, BBC Eastern Service, Pakistan Section, 1952. Copyright © BBC.

and in the subsequent postcolonial state. Style and genre are key to a text’s operation. In chapter 3 I probed how the perceived necessity for colonial writers to choose between modernist experimentation and social realism obscures their creative fusion of the two. This chapter reveals how Hosain’s Sunlight on a Broken Column (1961) and Chitale’s In Transit (1950) also reject this binary, creating hybrid versions of the historical novel and bildungsroman that center on the home as a means of representing larger national events.4 Yet unlike Joyce, who aspired to broadcast, and Forster and Anand, who broadcast thanks to preexisting careers as novelists, Chitale and Hosain instead broadcast first and then abandoned this work to dedicate themselves to the novel. Returning to the broadcast careers of both writers, as well as the context in which they wrote and were published, we are better positioned to understand not simply their significant contribution to the Indian novel in English but also the BBC’s role in the emergence of transnational feminism. This becomes clear only through a continued

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exploration of the mutual remediation of the novel and broadcasting, which in this late chapter begin to more firmly articulate their borders. While both authors’ novels merge the historical novel and the bildungsroman, Chitale draws from her experience writing for radio to organize the relationship of part to whole through a careful management of sonic space, organizing a series of fades from a narrator commenting on national events to the more intimate soundscape of the home. Despite the extent to which both broadcasters were limited to involvement in women’s programs, Chitale was nonetheless able to write and produce a program based on the genre of the feature commemorating the abolition of slavery in the British Empire. As a talks assistant, she was schooled in BBC organization, engineering, and programming; her training in programs covered talks, running commentaries, magazine programs, and news but focused most extensively on features.5 Chitale’s script reveals a thorough knowledge of radio production practices, including music cues in addition to spoken parts. The program’s organization of the sound field and juxtaposition of what Neil Verma calls “kaleidosonic” and “intimate” styles reveal attention to the challenge of linking a distant, critical narrator with a sense of emotional immediacy flowing from individual characters. This problem is precisely the one that both In Transit and Sunlight on a Broken Column take up: encapsulating both “empathy and collectivism” because whereas “intimate sequences make us certain that we know people . . . kaleidosonic sequences make us certain that we know ‘the people.’ ” 6 But whereas In Transit draws on formal techniques developed in radio drama and features to orient the reader alternately in the wider world of national history and the closer domestic world of the extended family, Sunlight more forcefully sides with the modernist bildungsroman, committing to its investment in the individual over society. When Hosain rejected her career at the Eastern Service because Urdu was earmarked for Pakistan only, she did not entirely reject the formal possibilities of radio itself, which she imported into the novel. Mobilizing Chitale’s and Hosain’s multimedia careers, we can begin to challenge three obstacles to the understanding of their work. As I will show in this chapter, the three are in fact inextricably linked, and the significance of Chitale’s and Hosain’s formal innovations has been obscured by inattention to their broadcast work. The first challenge is that we need to reimagine the narrative of Indian writing in English, which so often skips the midcentury moment in which

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they published. As early instantiations of the post-1945 literary landscape, they are both imbricated in the ethos of the BBC described in earlier chapters: critical of empire while also invested in British cultural exchange. But while both carry the prestige attending writers affiliated with the BBC (cited in their book jackets and forewords), Hosain has been marginalized and Chitale left out of histories of the Indian Anglophone novel.7 In the standard account, the “big three” (Anand, R. K. Narayan, and Raja Rao) roughly represent the moment of the independence struggle, whereas Salman Rushdie inaugurates the postcolonial triumph of Indian English novels, with a host of cosmopolitan writers following in his wake.8 More nuanced and detailed studies of the Indian English novel include nineteenth-century forebears, more contemporaries of the “big three” (Cornelia Sorabji, Iqbalunnisa Hussain, and G. Ishvani, as well as Eastern Service colleagues G. V. Desani and Ahmed Ali), and so on.9 But few discuss midcentury novels.10 Chitale and Hosain further suffer from being labeled “female novelists,” in which category they are safely ghettoized, whereas Rushdie reputedly represents more “important” public events; so far unremarked, then, is the fact that the characters in these two novels are also “handcuffed to history.”11 Rushdie imported the historical novel via Germany and Latin America; Chitale and Hosain, on the other hand, write in the tradition of Walter Scott, in which the fictional characters are at a further remove from historical personages. In other words, the novels explicitly address the nation but do so by enjoining a national vision with a domestic, familial one. Whereas in Midnight’s Children Saleem Sinai sits at the knee of General Ayub Khan, planning the coup of 1958 with pepperpots and chutney bowls, historical figures such as Gandhi and Nehru enter the novels of Chitale and Hosain at second hand.12 For many early critics, this dialectic between the individual and the national was misrecognized as a failure of construction, an inability on the novelist’s part to decide on the scale of her narrative. A final reason for the neglect of Chitale and Hosain, then, is that they are miscast as poor stylists. On the contrary, like a number of women’s texts published in the 1930s and 1940s and discussed recently by Jessica Berman, in Chitale’s and Hosain’s novels “complex political and discursive concerns disrupt the text’s surface and foreground its modernism”; among other formal innovations, we can recognize “textual merging of fact and fiction; play with external and internal realities; disruptions of time and order of emplotment; [and]

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attempts at new narrative perspectives.”13 Women’s perspectives in particular are central to both novels. The confusion of K. R. S. Iyengar over In Transit is instructive: wanting to read it as a historical novel, he faults it for focusing too much on the home. In his reading, the novel’s rendering of “personal and family perspectives” distracts from more important “larger national horizons.”14 This refusal to conform to existing genre rules characterizes both texts. Because Sunlight is narrated in first person, it has often been read as a kind of failed bildungsroman; instead, the fusion of personal bildung and national emergence is crucial to a feminist reimagining of the historical novel. In taking this view, I side with Susheila Nasta, who argues that Sunlight is not an “immature bildungsroman” but rather an “early and courageous attempt to discover a narrative poetics by which to open up the unresolved discontinuities of a painful past.”15 Like In Transit, Sunlight registers historical events and disruptions through the lens of individual experience, while simultaneously widening its frame of reference through the inclusion of characters from different social classes, faiths, and genders. In other words, and like In Transit, Sunlight is both bildungsroman and historical novel, thus capturing the clash of progressive narratives of national emancipation and personal growth against those of stasis occasioned by structural inequality and the maintenance of patriarchy. Their placement of the personal and familial on the same level as national politics is at the heart of their feminist critique of Indian nationalism. On a formal level, both novels take up the challenge of the feature: to personalize and dramatize an event from the past while simultaneously guiding the listener from a position of objectivity and remove. In this sense, the three aspects of their dismissal that I discuss above all unite in a broader understanding of the multimedia context in which they worked. Their moment is significant above and beyond its witnessing of independence and Partition: as I’ve shown in previous chapters, writers at midcentury struggled to articulate the relationship between literature and media. Engagement with the technical capacities of radio allow Chitale and Hosain to challenge patriarchal distinctions between national and personal, background and foreground, even as the Eastern Service’s gendered programming was constricting in ways that fiction was not. Bringing radio’s formal capacities to bear on the novel, these writers allow us in the present to better see how the two media forms combine, creating hybrid forms of the novel that at once draw from radio and reject it.16 While this chapter draws

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on pioneering studies of women in radio by Christine Ehrick, Kate Lacey, and Susan Ware, it also insists that genre is key to understanding the promises and limitations of broadcasting during this period and that a more robust account of media interaction is necessary to uncover the cultural work of both novels. MODERN WOMEN

As Kate Lacey argues, “The presentational strategies employed by women in their own programs . . . mark the dawning realization, so vital to radio’s future development, that, while radio talk is public discourse, the circumstances of reception are defined in the private sphere.”17 This is a particularly significant aspect of the broadcasting careers of Chitale and Hosain, who became public figures, but through work that sought to connect to listeners as individuals and—significantly—reach Indian women at home. This reception of women’s programs, Susan Ware points out, “opened a window to a world wider than the domestic sphere, breaking down the societal forces that kept women isolated and marginalized in their homes.”18 As such, broadcasting modeled a form of acceptable public engagement on both the transmitting and receiving ends of the apparatus. But if the presence of female writers and announcers in the studios testifies to women’s place in the public sphere, this role is then circumscribed by both the topics and tone of women’s programs, revealing a deep cultural ambivalence over the shifts in gender roles brought on by total war. As Michele Hilmes notes, gender divisions in broadcasting were “artificial, created not ‘naturally’ or by automatic reflection of social conditions but actively struggled over, debated, contested by the men and women” working in radio.19 Because of sexism in broadcasting and propaganda directives, the programs offered by both writers, though widely varied in topic, focused predominantly on the domestic sphere and women’s issues. While I don’t want to suggest that these issues were insignificant to these writers (their later novels confirm that the domestic sphere and women’s issues remained central concerns), nonetheless, we cannot know what else they may have spoken about if they had been granted the same freedom as their male compatriots. From interviewing women war workers (as Chitale did) to discussing the intricacies of juggling a career and childcare (Hosain), both emphasize the significance of the home. Women’s programs, to which both

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were often assigned, take up these issues in a central way, but even Hosain’s literary broadcasts tackle gender, focusing on the difficulty of writing about marriage. But while later in the chapter I will unpack some of the ways in which both resisted this pressure, for now it is crucial to understand some of the limitations imposed by the gender expectations of the time. For instance, in one of Chitale’s Programme Previews she says: “I certainly have aired my views on our programmes from London. I wish we could all have had a gossip together about them.”20 In addition to the doubt about whether these were truly Chitale’s views that she was airing (her later novel suggests a different view), the emphasis on gossip and other intimate forms of address is one of the hallmarks of women’s programming in the period. In another program Chitale describes bumping into a friend in Oxford Street, after which the two “went into the nearest restaurant for a chat.”21 Particularly apparent in Chitale’s Programme Previews and in both Chitale’s and Hosain’s interviews are what Lacey identifies as “the perceived characteristics of private female discourse—chitchat, gossip, and the heart-to-heart.”22 While male and female broadcasters alike cultivated an intimate form of address, it would be a mistake to overlook the extent to which some of the particular strategies were explicitly gendered. Hosain’s later efforts to push back against these restrictions only testifies to their general currency. Highlighting radio’s role in mediating gender around the globe, Christine Ehrick surfaces a tension between participation, on the one hand, and restriction, on the other: “Radio’s range and easy traversal of traditional spatial boundaries—including those deeply gendered demarcations of public versus private space—helped to reformulate ‘imagined communities’ and ‘intimate publics’ ” while at the same time “radio allows us to hear— figuratively and sometimes literally—the partial and contradictory ways in which women were incorporated into the public sphere.”23 As broadcasters, Chitale and Hosain challenged the exclusion of women from the public sphere while also technologically circumventing the walls that demarcated the private sphere. Yet as both Lacey and Ehrick make clear, countervailing forces made this break both “partial and contradictory.” For all that Chitale’s and Hosain’s presence on the air forced a reconsideration of any strict separation between the public and private spheres (and for women’s restriction to the private sphere), any realization of increased autonomy was nonetheless circumscribed by the format, content, and tone of women’s programs.

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Venu Chitale worked as an administrator (eventually overseeing the Marathi service after working in Orwell’s office) but was recruited for this work only after giving a series of successful broadcasts. “Known for the musicality and frothiness of her voice,” notes Sejal Sutaria, Chitale addressed listeners with a disarming, youthful, and optimistic intonation to match the upbeat content of her interviews.24 Even as Chitale worked primarily behind the scenes, she nonetheless managed to broadcast frequently as well, writing and performing in many programs.25 She worked on newsletters, literary programs, and interviews, but the bulk of her output was in specially designated women’s programs. The first of these, Women of the West, introduced women war workers, or “Women in National Service without being in Uniform,” a clear analog to German and American propaganda broadcasts that stressed the commitment of women to the war effort.26 In a later series, The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, Chitale explored issues surrounding childcare during the war, from reviewing art by child evacuees to the story of a nanny whose skill handling “small helpless little creatures” is now put to use in a factory on “the most delicate war material.” These programs feature a series of plucky women who trade in roles in the ballet for “oily overalls” in which to “drive an enormous truck,” or—in the case of Chitale’s charwoman—a “nifty service uniform” with “wispy hair tucked away under a smart military cap.”27 Like Anand, Chitale broadcast a series of interviews meant to familiarize Indian listeners with a variety of English characters. Ostensibly meant to boost cross-cultural understanding, the programs nonetheless acknowledge points of strain. In one, Chitale introduces Noel Sircar, who discusses lending libraries and newspapers, and in another she interviews fashion designer Bianca Nosca, who had recently designed a line of Utility clothes.28 In a more confrontational spirit, Chitale interviews Kingsley Martin, editor of the New Statesman. She asks him how he can defend the British press for reporting on India so infrequently, further suggesting that newspapers could create an appetite in the public for news about India, giving the public what they need rather than what they want (thus echoing the mission of the BBC). Chitale appeared with Anand, Orwell, and Eliot in the literary magazine on the air, Voice, discussed in chapter 3. She also reveals familiarity with European art, recalling her trip to see a performance of Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral, various Shakespeare plays, and modern artists: in her

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review of a children’s art exhibition, she asks, “How many future Van Gogh, Degas or Cézanne may lie dormant here?”29 Though Chitale must have been writing her debut novel during her employment, she did not introduce this work over the air. Nonetheless, her discussions of feminism, visual art, and Sanskrit literature contribute to her novel. For example, Chitale played a part in bringing one of the key intertexts of In Transit, the classic play Malati and Madhava by Bhavabhuti, to the air, seeing it through performance in December 1942. In a Programme Preview, Chitale explains: “I must say it was a bit of a job, too, to condense a 10 act Sanskrit play into a 13-minute radio feature. . . . This is the first Indian play ever produced on the BBC in English for Indian listeners.”30 Malati and Madhava was part of a series of Sanskrit classics translated and adapted for the Eastern Service that also included ɭʷdraka’s The Little Clay Cart, Bh‫ک‬sa’s The Vision of Vasavadatta, and Mudrarakshasa by Vishakhadatta.31 From this we might conclude that Chitale returned to Sanskrit classics to provide a plot outline for her love story and to show how marriage for love has Indian roots. In Transit then combines these influences with modern art and literature, enfolding all into the form of a hybrid novel. This counterintuitive itinerary wherein Malati and Madhava originates in India, is translated in London, but for listeners in India, and is then repurposed in an English novel published in India performs in miniature the larger pattern traced throughout Radio Empire, one that complicates how we think about even “native” elements in the Indian Anglophone novel. Both Chitale’s and Hosain’s broadcast work can be understood in the context of social feminism rather than more radical versions: the programs are aimed at women and assume that women’s interests are different from those of men. The programs center on the difficulties of raising children, keeping house, and cooking. In The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, “Then and Now,” Chitale contrasts a festive 1930s Christmas at the home of her friend (a painter) as against one now that she and her husband have taken in a number of child refugees. After describing a few examples of women working, she concludes: But women in this war have shown that it is hers also to do more. Hers is a double task. There is no exception for her from the tasks which are her birthright. She still has to cook and feed the husband, she still has to nurse and rear the babe, but she is capable and she is doing also the jobs of men. Before the war women worked, it

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is true, but mainly at tasks congenial to them . . . to-day they are active and efficient in all the spheres of public effort. To-day, the hand that rocks the cradle is not ruling the world merely indirectly, but it is actively shaping the destiny of the world.32

For both writers, talking to women from a variety of backgrounds over the air contributed to their sense of a common cause. The women’s programs are significant in establishing transnational links and debating feminism. For example, Chitale introduced a program on “Female Emancipation” in which the novelist and travel writer Ethel Mannin argued that though women were more likely to pursue careers after the war, they were not men’s intellectual equals. In a rare outburst, Chitale exclaims: “There are many points on which I disagree with her, especially the one about women being intellectually inferior to men!”33 This idea that women continue to perform traditional tasks while adding careers is a through line that speaks to the idea of the “People’s War.” But at the same time, it also introduces a new sense of women’s place in history, as a group that is forever changed. While Chitale is comfortable with maintaining the role of women as caretakers, she will brook no claim of women’s inferiority. Like many of the early members of the All India Women’s Congress, both writers were from wealthy families. This means that both anticipated Chandra Mohanty’s critique of the tendency of Western feminists to lump all women from the Global South under a rubric of “third-world women.” In a broadcast discussed in more detail below, Attia Hosain in particular checks a number of assumptions about her status as a representative of the “Indian woman.” In both her broadcasts and her writing, Hosain takes pains to contrast her experience as an upper-class, university-educated, and highly mobile British citizen with the lives of other Indian women. In other words, both Chitale and Hosain practice an intersectional feminism avant la lettre: their work traces the negative effects of patriarchy, the racism they face as women of color at the hands of the British, and the dangers faced by religious minorities in India, but it simultaneously draws attention to the mediating effect of social class on all of these other aspects. Honoring this investment, this chapter treats the two as transnational feminist writers rather than as third-world women.34 The issues surrounding the balance of family and work remained unresolved after the war, and Hosain takes them up in a conversation with

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Rose-Mary Clifford, “Points of View,” which was broadcast a year before the publication of Hosain’s short story collection, Phoenix Fled. Hosain explains: “Well, I’m married, I work, I have two children, a boy and a girl. . . . Apart from that I try to lead a normal life, as much as I can. I’m also trying to write.”35 Despite the cultural differences between the two, both face similar problems of caring for children while also working. Clifford adds that in England, middle-class women had not been taught to cook before the war but had to learn during it and have maintained the practice since. Thanks to Hosain’s aristocratic background, her experience was similar: because she went to university she never learned to cook, teaching herself when she arrived in England in 1947.36 In terms of childcare, the two share additional challenges during holidays because the children would not be in school. Hosain says this is “difficult” and that she is sometimes forced to take her children with her “when I have to do any special work and I can’t park them somewhere” (4). Otherwise she leaves a meal for them to reheat themselves or places them with friends. Cooking and childcare are issues they face in common and form a core around which the program revolves. If women have common cause cross-culturally in the challenges of childcare and cooking, on the other hand, Clifford is eager to establish cultural differences. Hosain is quick to complicate each instance of this, however. When their conversation turns to the extended family, Clifford speculates that it must be easier to care for children this way. Hosain, on the other hand, worries about its effect on individuality: “Actually when you had to be with a lot of people all the time, sometimes it’s a tremendous need to be alone. And it seems as if everybody’s interfering with one’s individuality” (5). Positioning the interview in the context of cold war discourses of friendship, Julie Cyzewski notes: “A discourse of friendship is used to indicate a relationship between equals as opposed to one structured by colonial power dynamics, but the relationships in the broadcasts operate within a model of hospitality that reinscribes inequality in the neoimperial context.”37 This moment of temporary awkwardness, in which Clifford’s attempt at hospitality (celebrating a feature of “the East”) is rejected as an oversimplification— one that pays insufficient attention to Hosain as an individual (let alone a writer)—testifies to the persistence of orientalism. Fantasies about the East continue to color their conversation. Later, Clifford asks if the English seem different from what Hosain imagined when

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reading about them before arriving in London. Hosain is forced to explain that she knew many English in India: she had an English governess and attended English schools. Further, her impression of the English in India before Independence was not positive: “I always found them rather patronizing, in fact, I do remember somebody once saying after I’d written a very simple notice in a club, ‘Oh, but what good English.’ Terrible because I thought I knew more about English literature than she did” (7).38 Far from feeling overwhelmed by a foreign country, Hosain felt partially at home in literary London, echoing the experience of Anand. Yet not once does Clifford ask about Hosain’s writing career, and that—in addition to Hosain growing up with servants—undermines the premise of Hosain as an average Indian woman. Further, as is typical of women’s programs, Hosain is here hailed as a woman and mother, not a writer. Her novel weighs these limitations differently, treating the protagonist’s roles as mother and wife as a complete afterthought. For now, as a broadcaster, Hosain was left to announce her calling without the benefit of a response. Outside the confines of imperial propaganda and after the war, however, Hosain was able to discuss her work on the domestic cultural service. While she was struggling to write Sunlight, she broadcast on the Third Programme, using the opportunity to address some of the many difficulties she faced writing in English and to an English audience. The program Writing in a Foreign Tongue explains her complicated relationship with English and why she chooses not to write in Urdu. For starters, she read more widely in English and had a wider vocabulary in it. She says: “There was, no doubt, some snobbery involved—at least in some cases—in the imitation and adoption of English ways and speech; but there was also a progressive element in it because in the struggle for freedom English was both a weapon as well as the key to, what I might call, the ideological arsenal.”39 In other words, though knowledge of English was a means of social advancement, it also allowed for the spread of Indian nationalism and the use of Enlightenment texts to counter the rhetorics of racial difference undergirding imperialism. In particular, Hosain focused on the difficulties of what Emily Apter later described as “untranslatables,” words or concepts that are “interculturally incommensurate.” 40 Among these terms is purdah, which Hosain underscores as not just a “physical fact” but rather a “structure of thought.” 41 In  Sunlight, Hosain makes clear that purdah was not a separation from men tout court but rather an elaborate system with exceptions based on

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familial, social, and class distinctions. Hosain speaking of purdah as both Urdu word and North-Indian cultural practice signals the difficult work assigned to both Hosain and Chitale: translating both linguistically and culturally between England and India. Much of their broadcast output involved translation in the more circumscribed sense, with, for example, Hosain performing Shakespeare in Urdu and Chitale writing Englishlanguage adaptations of the Sanskrit plays of Kalidas as well as translating George Orwell’s newsletters into Marathi. Hosain then describes the civilization and way of life behind a language that is difficult for a foreigner to access. The biggest difficulty, she claims, is that certain concepts don’t exist in both languages: “And in writing my novel I have become painfully aware of the inadequacy of the words I am using when I come up against that silent gap” (4). She notes the problems of pronouns—how they are different in Urdu in ways that make translation difficult. One example is the difficulty she faces rendering gender in poetry: female poets in Urdu use the pronoun Hum, or “we,” to avoid gendered verb endings (6). The elaborate system of manners surrounding the separation of genders poses problems as well. Hosain gives the example of trying to explain the moment in which the bride moves into her husband’s family, susral, which has no cognate in English (7). The option of explaining the concept is not an appealing one because it pulls the reader out of the diegetic world of the novel: “In fact there are many painful moments when I have to remind myself that I am not writing a guidebook nor a sociological survey, not a collection of strange and fantastic customs—that a novel is not a place for explanations of this kind” (5). Hosain resists adding a glossary because it takes away from the “completeness of the book as a creative work” (7). (Ultimately the contingencies of publishing held sway: the first edition of Sunlight appeared with a short glossary following the list of characters preceding the novel, one that is reprinted in all subsequent editions.) But because these problems remained unresolved, Hosain’s broadcast forms a key intertext to Sunlight. Not only does broadcasting here provide remuneration and a reading public, but it also provides a space and occasion for Hosain to debate her methods and workshop work-in-progress. The program also underlines Hosain’s self-conscious attempt to navigate her position as a kind of native informant: rather than simply appearing as an example of an “Indian novelist” on the Third, she uses the opportunity to draw attention to the need to negotiate her position.42

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Hosain provides the clearest and most emphatic example of a larger pattern traced throughout Radio Empire of the complex cross-fertilization of radio and the novel. Sunlight includes a character who listens obsessively to “every news bulletin” on the radio, switching frantically between the Eastern Service, All India Radio, and Azad Hind to keep apace of developments outside the house (283). Not only does the novel depict radio, it also explicitly works as a laboratory for Hosain the writer. Broadcasting over the  Third Programme in 1956, Hosain described in detail some of the impediments she faced in writing her debut novel, which would not appear for another five years. Nonetheless, and for reasons I unpack in the following sections, she turned away from radio, while Chitale deployed her training in scriptwriting to organize the relationship between individual and nation through careful management of the soundscape. For both Chitale and Hosain, broadcasting played more than a supporting role in their lives as writers. To fully appreciate their contribution to transnational feminism, the broadcasts must be read alongside their novels, which—though radically different in style—revive and reinvent the historical novel and bildungsroman to refocus attention on the daughters of Mother India. WOMEN AND THE HISTORICAL NOVEL

If nation is narration, as Homi Bhabha suggests, then In Transit and Sunlight underline the difficulties of this confluence.43 Writing hybrid novels that sit somewhere between the historical novel and the bildungsroman, Chitale and Hosain address a number of failures in the construction of India and Pakistan. Before turning in the next section to a discussion of how the bildungsroman interrupts the temporality of national emergence, first I highlight the use of the historical novel as a means of mapping the problem space into which these two novels intervene. Both novels trace the broad outlines of historical change on the subcontinent in the first half of the twentieth century: the growth of the independence movement (and competing factions within it), the increasingly violent (though ultimately futile) British response, the partition of India from East and West Pakistan. Equally influential are social changes: pressures on the extended family, economic changes, and the growth of women’s movements. But while the nationalist movement mobilized metaphors of the home and mother, these

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works also reverse this direction, running up and down a continuum between individual and nation. The nationalist movement asserted India’s modernity even as it clung to traditional gender roles surrounding Mother India, but the coexistence of disparate temporalities looms large as well because of the final dissolution of the feudal economic system, one of the factors central to the emergence of the historical novel. In her foundational study of the Indo-Anglian novel, Meenakshi Mukherjee places both In Transit and Sunlight in a group of works “rooted in the concept of history, the concept that man is shaped by the changing forces around him,” novels further marked by “an awareness of historical time—a recognition of inexorable change from the traditional values of an agrarian society to those of the agro-industrial modern age.”44 Seemingly unaware of the Hungarian Marxist Georg Lukács’s The Historical Novel (1937; English translation 1962), Mukherjee (in 1971) nonetheless reaches similar conclusions about the historical novel.45 In sharp distinction with Anand’s proletariat and R. K. Narayan’s upwardly mobile bourgeois characters, these novels focus on the breakup of aristocratic homes and a decline in fortunes as a synecdoche for wider economic transitions and attendant social pressures. Industrialization eliminates “a whole caste of pot makers,” worries Chitale in one of her broadcasts on cooking.46 Sunlight offers the conversion of a neighboring aristocratic home to a factory as a metonym for this revolution. From servants, to farmers, to the aristocracy, economic upheaval leads to new social patterns. Economic changes lead to a return to the historical novel in England as well; working within the context of early transnational feminism, Chitale and Hosain joined other British women writers who reclaimed the form. “For very specific historical reasons,” argues Diana Wallace, “women writers turned to the historical novel at the beginning of the century, at a moment when male writers were moving away from the genre, with the result that it has come to be seen as a ‘feminine’ form.” For Wallace, in England it was partly the “emergence of university-educated women writers” and partly the result of war: “It was after the First World War that British women, entering into history as enfranchised citizens for the first time, turned to the historical novel in substantial numbers and reshaped it into forms which expressed and answered their needs and desires.” 47 Early twentieth-century India was marked as well by women’s suffrage and the expansion of women’s education (including higher education). Unlike in

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England, World War I played a minor, supporting role in the development of the women’s historical novel in India. Though India contributed the largest volunteer army to the allies in the war—an experience cataloged in Anand’s Across the Black Waters—it was instead the confluence of delayed Independence, the burgeoning anti-imperial struggle, and the displacements of World War II and Partition that contributed most forcefully to the genre’s reinvention by women writers.48 Yet while the home was undergoing dramatic changes, the novels return to the first half of the century to renew attention to women’s issues that were stalled during the independence movement, despite women’s widespread involvement in the nationalist cause. Priya Joshi ends her reading of Krupabai Satthianadhan’s Kamala (1894) by suggesting that the nineteenthcentury “new woman” movement was put on pause for the nationalist movement: in the twentieth century, “the only feminine hagiography permitted was that of Mother India, unilaterally deployed and maintained by  the nationalist movement.” 49 These two post-Independence novels return to and renarrate this period, reopening the struggle while simultaneously carving out space for women as individuals outside of nationalist struggle. The larger societal trend of growing anti-imperial resistance is reflected in both novels. Every family was touched in some way by the movement, as evidenced by the fact that in both novels the family members acrimoniously split over support for the Congress cause. Yet household members are all affected, whether as active participants or as bystanders: even those seeking a neutral position are drawn into the growing conflict. Ultimately, in both cases, the family abandons their home. While we must observe the significant limitations of Lukács’s vision of the historical novel (as a strictly European form, for instance), his study nonetheless applies in postcolonial India. Derived from an entirely different set of examples, his rubric highlights significant features of these two novels in particular. In addition to the overlap I’ve identified in how Mukherjee and Lukács see history shaping the novel, some of the characters in the novels reflect self-consciously on the historical process. Nowhere is this more so than in those educated in England like Laila’s cousin Saleem, who says of nationalist politicians: “Those gentlemen are the instruments by which the historical process is going to destroy your class, though both of them hang on to the fringes of feudalism” (195). In this sense these

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disparate critical threads pull together to stress the breakup of feudalism and the rapidity with which Indian society is transformed. If for Lukács the French Revolution was the critical tipping point in European historical consciousness, here the independence struggle plays an analogous role. One important commonality is that, in both cases, those struggling against the Crown were “compelled to create mass armies.”50 Previously, warfare was a professional concern and—at least ideally—not even visible to civilians. The military in India was British, and though Indians served, they did so as a small professional class. The French Revolution mobilized the masses in France (and throughout Europe) through widespread use of propaganda that sought to make “the purpose of the war . . . clear to the masses” (23). Gandhi, Nehru, and other anti-imperial leaders used a variety of tactics to spread their message, including newspapers, magazines, acts of civil disobedience, mass rallies, and—of course—radio broadcasts. The Indian independence movement’s commitment to nonviolence means that its volunteers did not outwardly resemble an army. But in terms of widespread mobilization, the effect was the same. Abba, the patriarch from In Transit, explicitly deploys soldiering as a metaphor for peaceful resistance: “Grave things are ahead of this nation, and each one will have to play his own part in this new type of battle. I can only be behind the fighting lines. But I know that Bhayya is a soldier” (162).51 In practice, the soldiering of Bhayya and Abba was limited to nonviolent political resistance and volunteer work in the villages. Yet Abba’s insistence that all will have to “play [their] own part” captures the moment of mass mobilization. Indeed, many of Gandhi’s strategies brought the fight home, like spinning cloth, burning foreign products, attending new national schools, and challenging the salt tax. Precisely because supporters of Independence did not require weapons or military training, the ranks were unusually open to women, who marched and received lathi blows alongside men. This leads to what Lukács identifies as “the concrete possibilities for men to comprehend their own existence as something historically conditioned, for them to see in history something which deeply affects their daily lives and immediately concerns them” (24). As is often the case in the historical novel, the fictional characters of the family encounter real historical personages, whose presence testifies to a deeper affinity between the home and nation. For example, after reviewing

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the imposition of the Rowlatt Acts in April 1919 and Gandhi’s response, the narrative switches to the family’s conversation: This news, that Gandhiji had been arrested, created still further disturbances in different parts of the country. Young Bhayya cried in secret when he heard that the Mahatma had been arrested. He fasted for the whole day and kept strictly to his room. Abba and Dada talked about the reaction of the people to Gandhiji’s statement which suspended civil disobedience. (98)

Later, Tilak parades through Poona and the family watches joyfully; in another scene, Gandhi calls a meeting of women and Lopamudra attends. Yet like Walter Scott, Hosain and Chitale paint average heroes. Great historical figures like Gandhi appear in their novels, but they center on less committed figures. Scott’s heroes, argues Lukács, “bring the extremes whose struggle fills the novel, whose clash expresses artistically a great crisis in society, into contact with one another . . . a neutral ground is sought and found upon which the extreme, opposing social forces can be brought into a human relationship with one another” (36). To dramatize this conflict, the historical novel is peopled with characters “who sid[e] passionately with neither of the warring camps in the great crisis” (36–37). One example of this is Chitale’s character Dada, who is one of two brothers in the middle generation. Both Dada’s father Abba and his nephew Bhayya leave the wada to join Gandhi, whereas Dada refuses to take one side or the other, endlessly vacillating between sides, and even declaring “I hate extremes” (185). Dada advocates for inviting singers both for and against noncooperation and neither commits himself to his work as a lawyer nor forfeits his practice as Congress urges. In Sunlight, Nita Chatterji, Laila’s nationalist friend from college, criticizes Laila for failing to commit herself to a single cause: “You sway and bend backwards thinking you are flexible and being fair, but you really are unsure” (124). As in Lukács’s reading of Scott, Laila’s failure to outwardly side with Congress allows her to bring the “opposing social forces” into relationship with one another: representatives from each side attempt to bring her on board. By including characters like Dada and Laila, who outwardly refuse to take sides, both novels invite the larger national struggle into the family home.

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Both novels narrate a turbulent period not simply in Indian national history, but in shifting gender relations as well. The two are explicitly linked in two of the dominant narratives: one of Mother India, with the nation coded female, and the other the reform movements that sought to counter the British argument that only the colonial state protected women and advanced their interests.52 Shifting economic conditions (especially pressures on the feudal agrarian system), the transnational growth of women’s groups fighting for women’s suffrage (particularly in England), and the opening of higher education to women contributed to a period of transformation as well. Because the colonial state fashioned itself as the protector of Indian women, and because British reformers were active in India, women’s rights had to be coded as stemming from local needs and interests rather than from Western influence, which could be (and often was) dismissed as unpatriotic and irreligious. Hindu reform was thus one of the central concerns of the moderate wing of the independence movement. The thinking was that it was necessary to remove the British excuse that they were there to protect Indian women from unfair laws and practices. This faction of the movement, then, aimed to create more equitable conditions for women as a necessary first step, to prove that Indians were ready for independence. Significantly, both take up the challenge of framing women’s rights within Indian rather than Western traditions. Chitale, for example, includes historical figures who advocated for Hindu reform, including most prominently Ramabai Ranade. One of Chitale’s characters, Mr. Joshi, represents the tendency of the time to link women’s rights to the independence struggle: “I say that man has no right to dictate to woman, that woman should be as free to decide her destiny as man has always been to decide his, or as he is still struggling for yet more freedom” (103). In Sunlight, Laila’s friend Nadira expresses her disapproval of a proposed match by saying that “marriages had moved away from the Islamic ideal and were like prison sentences without benefit of trial” (132). For Nadira, what were then seen as “traditional marriages” (as opposed to Western love-matches) are actually a perversion of earlier Islamic practice. In both of these cases, the women’s movement is depicted as a native response to historically contingent limitations placed on women. On one hand, traditional restrictions (arranged marriage in Chitale and purdah in Hosain) are reinforced by the older generations. Awwa, the nanny

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in In Transit, reinforces traditional gender roles, convincing the children of the “difference between the boys and the girls,” by “stressing to the little girls that they were one day going to their husbands’ homes and would have to listen to mothers-in-law, whereas the boys would be free of that” (165). Similarly, in Sunlight, the older women police the maintenance of purdah, with Laila’s beloved Aunt Abida arguing for a restrictive interpretation of tradition. On the other hand, both novels also build a case for equal rights deriving from Indian traditions. If the nanny represents one view of the past, the grandfather from In Transit, who is in favor of widow remarriage and other reforms, offers a counterargument. Drawing on Hindu beliefs in the sanctity of all of creation, Abba argues forcefully for equal treatment; for him, women performed different kinds of work, but their contributions were no less valuable. Abba’s insistence on the difference between men and women (but refusal to privilege one over the other) is characteristic of social feminism, an influential early belief in the women’s suffrage movement in India. Kumudini Bose, who was an advocate of women’s suffrage in Bengal, is representative of the reform movement depicted throughout In Transit. Summarizing Bose’s views, historian Barbara Southard notes that Bose shared the social feminist outlook that was typical in the national women’s movement in India during this period. She sought to broaden Indian concepts of woman’s role rather than to mount a direct challenge to tradition. In her writings Mrs. Bose did not challenge the traditional concept that the role of women in society differs from that of men, because women are mothers and responsible for the home. However, she did not accept the corollary advanced by conservatives that women are therefore less suited to public life. On the contrary, she maintained that woman’s role as guardian of the home should give her special insight and a special interest in public affairs, because there is no aspect of public policy that does not affect the family.53

Like Bose, the narrator of In Transit emphasizes the role of women in raising children and tending to the home but supplements these traditional duties with involvement in politics. In Transit records this intergenerational shift in women’s place in the public sphere, calling to mind Lukács’s claim that the historical novel emerges in its modern form in a post-Enlightenment moment when the

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masses for the first time see themselves as historical agents. The shift in Hosain and Chitale is not that women are for the first time historical agents (nineteenth-century novels were written in a post-Enlightenment spirit as well, and the characters in Kamala saw themselves as results of the mix of England and India, for example). Instead, the key development is that a confluence of forces put pressure on the extended family at the same time that women played an important role in the independence movement. In the nineteenth century, women who had access to education saw themselves as exceptions to otherwise stable gender relations. In the post-Independence moment, on the other hand, educated women saw themselves as a part of wide-ranging social, economic, and political changes. Further, they played a crucial role in imagining and achieving a new political order so that even though they were denied freedoms as women, they nonetheless saw themselves as capable of creating change, of history as process. Specifically, these two novels are aimed at the discrepancy between the rhetoric of independence and the reality of women. THE INTIMATE AND KALEIDOSONIC STYLES OF IN TRANSIT

For her first novel, In Transit, Venu Chitale drew on more than the works she produced for broadcast on the Eastern Service: she uses techniques from the radio genre of the feature to organize the soundscape of the novel. Whereas critics of In Transit have found fault with the disconnect between national events and the daily events of the home, the switch between the two was characteristic of late 1930s and early 1940s radio.54 While Chitale was surrounded by the full range of radio programming during her years at the BBC, I argue that her feature on the abolition of slavery in the British Empire best demonstrates her command of the techniques that are then translated into her novel. Chitale referred to her program as a feature and harnesses the genre’s ability to be “simultaneously factual and emotive,” even though it was written, produced, and recorded outside the remit of the Features Department.55 The program’s organization of preexisting text, dramatization, and music—but particularly its careful staging of these elements alternately between foreground and background—provides a set of tools with which Chitale structures In Transit. Chitale’s feature appeared in Through Eastern Eyes: Anniversaries of the Month, a series serving a clear propaganda purpose insofar as they are

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advertised as written “entirely by Indians, with no Europeans taking part at all.”56 Nonetheless, the feature was a genre developed in the 1930s at the BBC; as Lance Sieveking puts it, a feature “is an arrangement of sounds, which has a theme but no plot.”57 Laurence Gilliam, appointed assistant director in charge of BBC Features in 1936, characterized the genre as distinct from straight news as well as radio drama: “Unlike the play, whose business it is to create dramatic illusion for its own sake, the business of the feature is to convince the listener of the truth of what it is saying, even though it is saying it in dramatic form.”58 Chitale’s theme is a particularly self-congratulatory anniversary of British abolition epitomized by William Lecky’s famous statement (included in the program): “The unweary, unostentatious and inglorious crusade of England against slavery may probably be regarded as among the three or four perfectly virtuous pages comprised in the history of nations.”59 This rosy account had already been submitted to scrutiny during the interwar years, most notably by C. L. R. James in The Black Jacobins (1938) and an earlier BBC broadcast by James also commemorating abolition.60 Nonetheless, with the exception of a song arranged by the black British composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, all the excerpts in the program are taken from white writers. Even Una Marson, who in Voice had read some of her own poetry, was used here to read a stanza from Dorothy Parker’s “The Dark Girl’s Rhyme.” But although the program was hardly progressive in its treatment of the topic and selection of source texts, it was nonetheless formally innovative, demonstrating Chitale’s command of both intimate and kaleidosonic styles. Verma describes the latter style as “the feeling of a shifting sonic world that is accessed through a central point that is itself static and removed from events.” 61 In contrast to the intimate style, which uses a character within the fiction to bring the listener through the diegetic world, in the kaleidosonic style of radio production an announcer outside of the place and time of the diegetic world links various aural vignettes. In Chitale’s script, the narrator or studio announcer emerges from the “noplace” of the studio: “closely miked” and “alone,” in an unmarked soundscape devoid of natural reverb thanks to deadening sound panels on the walls.62 This voice sets the scene, describing events in the past tense: “It was taken for granted that as many as half the cargo would die on the journey, but even so the profit made by selling the survivors was very large. Even when they had reached land only the fittest survived in their new surroundings. They were like trees

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uprooted from their own soil . . . they were nameless and homeless.”63 After this second pause, the voice of Una Marson enters, reading a stanza from “The Dark Girl’s Rhyme.” The narrator then pulls the listener back to a distant view, describing plantations in the Caribbean and in South Africa. This pattern repeats throughout the program with increasing speed, shorter and shorter narrative intrusions framing a series of ever shorter readings from the literature surrounding abolition, including passages from William Pitt, Samuel Johnson, Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko, Alfred Tennyson’s “Locksley Hall,” and John Greenleaf Whittier’s paean to John Brown, “Brown of Ossawatomie.” As in NBC’s The March of Time: Each story features a single person performing a single action in one scene, yet the result is worldmaking. Like “War of the Worlds,” March of Time suggests that there are transmitters set out in a grid upon a map of the earth, a preexisting net of fixed audiopositions, each node of which can be switched on or off as if from a celestial vantage. Each story is entirely independent, but the characters in them . . . are each precisely the same distance from “us.” If the form of intimate sound ritualizes empathy, the design of March ritualizes equality . . . The aesthetic also tended to flatten time, as no matter how the scenes are sequenced or dispersed, we get the feel of simultaneity. Clarity was maintained because the broadcast routinely returned to [the announcer].64

More than simply orienting the listener, the narrator seems to select from various “nodes” to give brief examples of the writing of these various authors. The net effect is that a transatlantic literature from the span of centuries is condensed into the present moment and the space of the listener’s receiver. As Verma argues, this style of production trades radio’s sense of intimacy for a sense of public address, potentially encompassing the nation, if not the empire. Typical of the kaleidosonic style are Chitale’s “sudden segues,” sense of “teleporting,” and deployment of “rapid scenes in temporally independent modules.” 65 All these features mark Chitale’s script as a complete departure from the style of her other programs, which cultivated a sense of intimacy by sticking to a single location, depicting only one or two characters close to the microphone, and employing markedly less formal diction. The choice of a distant perspective in the feature reinforces the program’s propaganda value by suggesting that writers throughout the empire

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helped to bring about abolition, and—by extension and in the words of a MOI directive—that the empire “fosters freedom.” 66 There is a significant exception in an early moment in the script, however, during which Chitale switches to the intimate style for roughly a third of the entire program: this particular scene is given more time to unfold, characters are fleshed out, and the listener’s audioposition is closest to a “Woman Slave” (played by Marson), thus allowing the listener to sympathize with her. As Verma points out, “In these cases, we sympathize with a ‘near’ character with whom we have positional intimacy so that we might empathize with ‘further-off’ characters in distress and privation.”67 Like the radio work of the American Norman Corwin, Chitale’s here synthesizes the two styles, selectively reaping the benefits of each. In the intimate section of the piece, a slaveholder (played by Orwell) orders the flogging of the Slave Woman from a greater distance from the microphone, yelling into it, “Come here! Adam! . . . You belong to me . . . me . . . do you understand.”68 From a middle distance the Slave Man responds, and in dialect, further differentiating his voice from the others in the program. Finally, closest to the microphone, the Slave Woman informs us, via a monologue directed to Adam, that she has no wish to live after her last master sold her son. Chitale then has the spiritual “Steal Away” fade up and then out to conclude the scene, taking listeners away from the woman’s audioposition, but—in a move characteristic of the intimate style, gesturing to the unnamed and “further-off” characters.69 How the novel runs up and down the ladder of the domestic and national reveals Chitale’s borrowing from the genre of the feature. Organizing the relationship between objective narration and subjective, personal experience was a challenge in the feature and novel alike. One of the most noticeable formal elements of the novel is the interweaving of the story of the family with events in India. If narrators in novels often set the scene for actions that unfold between characters, in Chitale’s novel this ratcheting between levels is effected specifically through the soundscape. The novel opens with a memory of wedding music: “It was just after midnight and the streets of Poona seemed still alive with the reverberation of the music;  the music of bands, pipes and drums that had ushered in a new bride.”70 Music was the most common way to establish location in the feature and is accordingly used here for the same purpose. But whereas music reverberating in the city streets is kaleidosonic, the second section of the

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novel switches to a more intimate register, featuring the newly married Dada’s friends and sister teasing him: “Come on, Dada, what is her new name?” (2). Not only has the source of sound shifted from a loud procession (complete with fireworks) to a conversation, but also the soundscape has shifted to match: from the reverberant, public city streets to the quieter, private quarter of the family home, or wada. This pattern is extended such that the wider, national level is addressed in a kaleidosonic style, whereas the issues raised by larger national events are explored in an intimate style, closer to particular characters. For instance, the narrator introduces the Rowlatt Acts from a remove typical of the newsreel: “In India the month of April in the year nineteen hundred and nineteen was stained with blood. . . . The Rowlatt Bills introduced in that year to cover the situation when the Defense of India Act expired, and condemned by Mahatma Gandhi as unjust, subversive of the principles of liberty and destructive of the rights of the individual, enraged the leaders of the nation” (95). The opening section of the ninth chapter remains at this height, reviewing national developments that include Gandhi’s second satyagraha in the Gujarat district of Kaira. In the following sections of the chapter, however, Dada and Abba debate nonviolent resistance in dialogue (and within the home) (98–99).71 Another moment from late in the novel demonstrates the use of the kaleidosonic style: “In the Minorities’ Committee of the Round Table Conference Mahatma Gandhi had said, ‘I would far rather that Hinduism died than that Untouchability lived’ ” (476). Gandhi’s speech, much more of which is reproduced in the following paragraphs, is bookended by journalistic context that then gives way to an intimate scene (conveyed in the intimate style): In India the day of the commencement of Gandhiji’s fast was marked by fasting and prayer as a wave of self-imposed acts of purification swept home, school and colleges. Mohana and her friends in the hostel were no exception, but Roshan, even though she submitted to the discipline of fasting, was rebellious about prayers. “Prayers are nonsense!” she declared. “Of course we can’t blame him for his belief, but really, have you ever heard of anybody going about the business of gaining independence in this fashion?” (477)

Within the space of two paragraphs, the novel shifts from reported speech by a historical figure to a scene in the girls’ dorm room in which they debate

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Gandhi’s methods. The heart of each chapter generally functions on this latter, more intimate level, whereas new chapters often begin by recounting the progress of the independence movement, only then switching to events in the wada. As in the feature, however, both levels are depicted through sound clips: the nationalist songs, statements from Congress, speeches by Gandhi, and parables from the classics repurposed for the nationalist struggle transitioning—through the narrator—to the quieter dialogues of home. While I have suggested thus far that Chitale’s management of the sonic space of the novel draws from strategies she deployed in her earlier radio feature—thus representing a striking example of media convergence—at a key moment, sound is also used to signal the novel’s investment in the bildungsroman. In general, Chitale’s fluid deployment of kaleidosonic and intimate styles furthers the novel’s historical frame, linking otherwise distant national events to the home. But as a hybrid between the historical novel and the bildungsroman, In Transit also turns increasingly to the individual story of Mohana. In a key scene, Mohana—a budding author—reads part of a play she wrote while Madhav secretly listens: She came and stood between two of the pots of flowering mogra . . . the red glass bangles on her wrist producing a tinkling sound as they slipped back on her arms. Madhav who knew that she was bound to hum her usual tune listened for it, but instead she began to speak into the quiet evening. “I want to go to that land with you: wherever you have to go I wish to follow.” Mohana, imagining herself entirely alone, was doing a piece of acting to herself. She narrated part of the story with feeling. (355–56)

As so often in this novel, the narrator presents a juxtaposition of different sounds: the tinkling bangles, the imagined “usual tune” Mohana hums, but then instead an excerpt from her play. Instead of playing the part of one of the actors and reading a monologue, however, Mohana takes the role of a narrator and two actors. But even then, instead of acting the parts out (with corresponding blocking and movement), she reads the parts into the courtyard, allowing Madhav only to listen to, not see, the performance. In short, Chitale has inserted Madhav into audioposition, creating conditions of reception that echo those of a radio auditor. But whereas this moment

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partakes in the domestic soundscape and intimate style of the novel tout court, its expression of Mohana’s desire (only slightly coded in her drama) also signals the novel’s investment moving forward in turning from the historical novel to the bildungsroman, culminating in the engagement of the two. Not only is the play a means of indirectly expressing Mohana’s interiority, but her very act of becoming a writer also participates in the bildungsroman’s long-standing investment in narrating the call to a vocation. In Transit marks a significant moment in the unfolding relationship between the novel and radio in that—like Finnegans Wake—it borrows representational strategies from broadcast genres and the larger possibilities of the medium. In Transit, however, becomes increasingly ambivalent toward the historical novel, moving ever closer to the bildungsroman without ever siding firmly with the latter’s investment in probing interiority. In its insistence on the priority of the soundscape, In Transit tends to the outwardly facing over the self-reflexive, performance rather than rumination. Attia Hosain, impatient with the limitations of 1930s and 1940s radio drama, instead stages a return to the modernist bildungsroman, leaving the radiogenic nature of In Transit to be picked up much later in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children.72 SUNLIGHT ON A BROKEN COLUMN AND A CRITIQUE OF POSTCOLONIALISM

Like In Transit, Sunlight is a hybrid of the bildungsroman and the historical novel that explores the first half of the twentieth century through the lens of the family saga. Radically different in its fragmented, modernist style and its use of first-person point of view, Sunlight nonetheless overlaps with In Transit by capturing the breakup of the traditional multigenerational home by tracing the diverging fates of characters drawn from three generations of the same family. While this fragmentation comes as a result of increasing pressures of modernization, in both instances it is attached more specifically to disagreements over how to respond to the call of the Indian National Congress. Both novels return to and narrate the period of the independence struggle, deploying the Indian home as a microcosm of the nation. Though the link between home and nation is central to nationalism, it carries risks when deployed in Sunlight. Defying the warning of Saleem,

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Laila’s cousin, who tells her, “You cannot reduce a whole political and social problem to an individual one,” Hosain leverages the individuality of her characters and their personal stories to problematize abstract narratives (197). As Suvir Kaul points out: “Hosain registers the scale and violence of political events by personalizing them—for, as Laila observes bitterly, Partition has reduced millions of uprooted human lives to numerical figures.”73 By portraying on the human level the political and historical events that rock India and Pakistan, Hosain mobilizes her characters to explore overlooked aspects of Independence, not least of which is the stalled women’s movement. Saleem’s criticism nonetheless gestures to the heart of Laila’s youthful rebellion: refusing the propensity to focus on abstractions like religious communities or population statistics over individuals. Whereas In Transit depicts women’s groups as crucial support for both the nationalist movement and women’s freedoms, Sunlight is far less optimistic. Political aspirations in the novel are repeatedly revealed as cynical ploys for power, and this extends to women’s groups. One of Laila’s rare dramatic outbursts takes place during one of her aunt’s informal gatherings, during which local women debate the merits of a purdah park created by a women’s organization. In this case, the work for women is not the end of such meetings, but rather a means to arrange marriages. This particular meeting is attended by a “hawk-like” woman searching for a bride for the second son of a local prince (132). Laila’s aunt is flummoxed when, after she defends Laila for not keeping purdah, the story emerges of a Muslim girl from Laila’s school who ran away with a Hindu boy. Jilted by her lover, the girl cannot go back to her parents, and she commits suicide. In addition to purdah parks, houses for fallen women were common charities for women’s groups, but Laila’s classmate was refused admittance even here because “communal feelings” had been roused (133). While the women present are content to forget the individual for the sake of communal accord, Laila is incensed. Defending the girl to the shock and consternation of the other women, Laila cites “poems . . . written about such love” and heroines “like her in novels and plays,” dubious comparisons in the eyes of this group (133–34). In her outburst, Laila points to literature as a designated space for individual aspirations; this moment then folds back onto the novel in which it appears, presenting the novel—with its longtime investment in bourgeois individualism—as a form in tension with communal identity. Laila’s

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concern for her individual classmate opens onto a larger pattern wherein gender was increasingly superseded by communal identity in the political realm. Laila’s opposite, her well-behaved cousin Zahra, becomes later in the novel a “member of every government-approved committee for social service and women’s welfare” in Pakistan (302). Laila, in contrast, withdraws from the political realm and nurtures individual friendships across communal lines. Like Hosain’s family (who were split between Pakistan and India), one of the central conflicts for Laila’s family is in deciding whether to side with Congress or the Muslim League. After Laila witnesses the police beating noncooperators, and in a rare glimpse of Laila’s political feeling, we learn early on that a hot sickness burned inside of us, a fear and an anger; and we vowed when we were old enough to fight for our country’s freedom as the Satyagrahis did . . . to march in peaceful protest, to defy the might of the arrogant whites. From that day we had stopped singing the alien National Anthem at school concerts. . . . We felt we were part of a great movement, and the taunts of Anglo-Indian girls at school had lost their power. (51)

Though Laila pledges with Sita to fight for independence, it remains pure potentiality for the remainder of the novel. Her family, on the other hand, is forced to decide more publicly, though the opposing forces are brought into the home for their most in-depth treatment. Laila’s uncle Hamid, a former member of the ICS and a landowner concerned with his rights in future, thinks that siding with Congress is a safer bet. Joining Hamid are his son Kemal and nephew Asad, who attends the Jamia Millia Islamia, established in 1920 on the Congress side of the Muslim divide. Saleem, on the other hand, argues against his father, for the Muslim League. A political fight ensues, as Uncle Hamid runs for office under the Congress ticket, while Saleem campaigns for Begum Waheed, who runs as part of the Muslim League (235). Because Kemal sides with his father, the two brothers and Laila debate what to do leading up to Partition. Kemal and Laila choose to stay in India; Saleem, on the other hand, works for a private company and has been promised a promotion if he moves to Pakistan (285). As Partition nears, Laila is forced to admit that “our disagreements were no longer youthful differences of points of view; they shaped our lives and echoed bigger

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divisions” (303). The larger divisions between Congress and the Muslim League, national in scope, are here dramatized on the familial level, thus condensing “a whole political and social problem to an individual one,” to quote Saleem. Laila’s response to Partition, refusing communal identity by remaining in India, stands in sharp contrast to the “cold definition of statistics” with which Hosain learned of the “enforced migrations of more millions than ever before, of massacres and infinite loss.”74 Unlike In Transit, Sunlight continues into 1952, thus carrying its characters through (though certainly not beyond) the trauma of Partition. Part 4 of the novel depicts Laila moving through the now empty family house, Ashiana. The dramatic shift in time is revealed gradually through external visual detail such as the tricolor flying over Government House. Strangers now occupy Ashiana, many of them refugees from Pakistan, where Saleem has relocated. Uncle Hamid, who listened to the radio obsessively during the war, has been dead for five years. Kemal married a non-Muslim and, stationed in Delhi, asks his mother to cut back on expenses, a request that became a necessity when feudalism was abolished. Making matters more difficult, Saleem, as an evacuee, lost his stake in the property, so Kemal had to sell Ashiana (in Lucknow) to buy Saleem’s share in the older Hasanpur house, thus maintaining the family’s country seat. Laila reveals that she bought a house in the hills and (unlike Hosain) stayed on during Partition. She upbraids Saleem for looking after his own safety and for his communal prejudice: not only did he abandon her, but she was saved by Sita and Ranjit, “those very Hindus against whom [he] had ranted” (304). Like Saleem, critics have long been vexed by how Sunlight relates the individual to the social, often mistaking the book for thinly veiled autobiography. Reading the novel as the coming-of-age story of an Indian Muslim woman, many readers have sought out connections between Hosain and Laila. But Sunlight’s Laila is not simply Hosain. For one thing, Laila’s first husband dies during World War II, whereas Hosain’s does not until 1982. Hosain married at nineteen, in 1933, earlier than Laila. Further, Hosain had two older sisters, all of whom attended La Martinière school, whereas Laila is an only child. Laila lives exclusively in and around Lucknow, remaining there during and after Independence. Hosain was from Lucknow but, in contrast to Laila, lived in Bombay during World War II (where—unlike Laila—she mingled with many writers, filmmakers, and artists).75 And

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Hosain relocated to London before Partition. Paradoxically, Hosain’s physical remove from Partition could have contributed to her ability to write about it; safely ensconced in London, she was nonetheless confronted with accounts of the bloodshed over the radio. Faced with a choice between India and Pakistan, Hosain instead opted to stay on and maintain her British citizenship: “There was no renouncing of nationality. In 1947 everyone had the legal right to be British citizens. . . . For personal reasons, and to avoid going against my conviction that there should not have been a Partition, I chose to stay with my children in England” (xx). Though members of her family were involved in the Muslim League, and even after her husband returned to India, Hosain remained in the United Kingdom. Hosain’s feelings about undivided India were so strong that she quit the Eastern Service in 1965 when it was split into national sections, with Urdu now for Pakistan only (Hosain preferring to broadcast in Urdu to India and Pakistan alike).76 I elaborate these differences because though Hosain certainly drew from her life experiences (and depicts events bounded by her lifetime), the proximity of Laila to Lucknow and Partition as well as her status as an orphan and only child offer more symbolic potential to the novel than Hosain’s biography. Detaching Laila from Hosain, we can better understand how the novel’s critique functions simultaneously on a formal level. Hosain’s diction and syntax draw from Urdu, but Sunlight is a fictional blend of the bildungsroman and historical novel. As a story centered on a house abandoned by members of a fading aristocracy, Sunlight has often garnered comparisons to Elizabeth Bowen’s nonfiction account of her own family estate, Bowen’s Court (1942). Instead, Sunlight is hitched far more closely to Bowen’s The Last September; as in that novel, Sunlight mixes aspects of the bildungsroman with subtle nods to the Big House novel.77 These notes are played pianissimo, however. Though the house seems haunted to Laila, this is registered only by infrequent shadows and strange sounds wafting out of the old section of the house (18). In both novels, the protagonists live through violent anti-imperial struggles yet experience the conflict at a remove: from within the confines of their homes. Despite Laila siding with Congress, the novel is equally concerned with her own independence, about her escaping the confines of her situation, tradition, and family, and is in this sense radically different from In Transit. As in other modernist bildungsromane the social vision of the novel grows alongside Laila’s consciousness; when

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she returns to her family’s country house in Hasanpur (as a teenager), she notices poverty and squalor that had previously eluded her (173). Further, Sunlight, which takes its title from a line in T. S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men,” is compact and austere next to the bulky, nineteenth-century style of In Transit. While both novels follow in the tradition of Scott, Sunlight merges its interest in the near past with a minimalist aesthetic that more closely approximates the work of Bowen.78 It is precisely the collision of historical novel and bildungsroman, however, that has puzzled and infuriated critics. Mukherjee, for example, worries over Laila’s “orgy of sentimentality” when returning to her childhood home, further critiquing the novel’s “general weakness of structure” and “confusion of purpose.” Calling to mind Iyengar’s dismissal of In Transit, Mukherjee wonders: “Does the novelist intend to present from Laila’s point of view a picture of men and manners in a particular period of Indian history, or does she intend to present one individual’s groping towards selfrealisation?”79 In other words, are we reading an historical novel or a bildungsroman? As Anand reminds us, it is possible to create a form in between the two: “The content of the lives rendered is Indian, but the form in which these contents are unfolded is influenced by the patterns of the new 20th century novels of the west” (xii). Zeroing in on the fictional quality of the novel allows for a crucial reconsideration of genre, opening a window onto the novel’s engagement with the bildungsroman. This is a necessary reparative move because even critics sympathetic to Hosain’s mission of writing a feminist account of Partition have missed how the novel’s refusal to reproduce genre expectations is linked to broader concerns. Antoinette Burton, whose reading recuperates the significance of the home to history, nevertheless misses Sunlight’s modernism, claiming that the novel is not a bildungsroman because “it is not teleological, as novels of development invariably are.”80 Only through a contrapuntal reading, by restoring Hosain to the group of writers around the BBC, can we observe that one of her signal achievements in linking the family saga and the bildungsroman is that she furthers a longer-standing feminist critique of the Goethean male developmentalist plot. Summarizing this pattern in the work of Jean Rhys and Elizabeth Bowen, Jed Esty points to “a profound contradiction within the gender and colonial systems of modernity—one with deep-seated implications for narrative form.” The result is what Esty describes as an array of modernist metabildungsromane: “coming-of-age”

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tales, but with “inbuilt progressive time spliced to other temporalities— static, regressive, accelerated, syncopated.”81 Read by the lights of the modernist antidevelopment plot, Sunlight begins to register as part of a larger, transnational literary movement that simultaneously deepens its critique of local conditions. If—like Bowen’s Lois Farquar—Laila’s development is frozen, the world around her is riven with change. Continuing into the postcolonial years, Sunlight is nonetheless centered on the nationalist movement in the interwar years. Opening in 1931, Sunlight traces the break-up of Ashiana, the Lucknow house of Laila’s taluqdar (landowning) Muslim family. Within a few years the protagonist’s grandfather, Baba Jan, dies, and traditional courtly entertainment and arranged marriages coexist uneasily with jazz records, trips to the cinema, and marriage for love. As the story of a rapid yet incomplete break from the traditional past, the novel opens with Laila’s aunt moving out of the zenana, the women’s section of the house. Even though Aunt Abida undertakes this action so that she can tend to her ailing father (thus maintaining gender expectations), this move performs in miniature the action of the book: women circulate in ever-wider circles. Laila essentially makes the same movement on a much larger scale and with more friction, throwing off purdah, attending university, and marrying for love. As in Hosain’s broadcasts, Laila is torn between the world of her family’s past and her inner world of reading. Unlike In Transit, which minimizes the role of the West in women’s rights, Sunlight is more likely to present liberatory ideas as both modern and Western. Echoing Hosain’s earlier broadcast on how English provides the keys of the “ideological arsenal,” for Laila, wide reading in English is not simply an escape from her immediate surroundings (though she values it for that reason, too) but instead provides what she identifies as the source of individual liberty. She directs especially forceful condemnation on the refusal to consult male medical doctors for women’s health issues. Asked by a servant to say a prayer over his sick wife, Laila unsuccessfully suggests the hospital instead. When the wife dies of tetanus, Laila rages against the “hollowness of the ideas of progress and benevolence preached by my aunt and her companions” since these modern notions were not actually put into practice (138). This tragedy, entirely preventable in Laila’s eyes, is a precursor to her beloved aunt’s death. Laila rails against the “murderous hypocrisy and bigotry” that denied women access to male doctors (204–5). Abida dies for this reason shortly after she

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is married, suggesting the tragic element of colonial enlightenment. One of Laila’s cousins captures this paradox particularly well. A former student at Aligarh University forced back home by consumption, he speaks to Laila in English to recount his final act of defiance: refusing to allow his education to be instrumentalized, he burns his cherished English books to prevent his father from selling them (101).82 Part of the novel’s rejection of a teleological narrative lies in the proliferation of these cases of tragic immobility. Like her cousin, Laila struggles to make use of her wide reading, suggesting that while the literary form of the modernist bildungsroman is useful in her rebellion, it is also necessary because her reading does not offer the option of simply joining the English side. If English books create an intellectual home for Laila, this is not true of English people. Laila is not welcomed as an equal by the British in India, despite attending their schools and speaking their language. When Zahra waxes nostalgic about the respect granted to the taluqdars, Laila wonders “if that knowledge would have helped me when the King’s groom’s grand-daughter called me ‘nigger’ at school and refused to play with me” (147). Even less antagonistic British characters nonetheless keep Laila at one remove: Mrs. Martin, Laila’s former governess, remembers Laila’s father “was just like one of us” but can accept Laila only under the Anglicized moniker “Lily” (48, 46). When Laila volunteers to assist illiterate purdah women in voting, she recoils from the patronizing tone of the British officials: “But for the grace of circumstances and education there go I, I thought . . . she is closer to the people . . . while we with our Bach and Beethoven, our Shakespeare and Eliot put ‘people’ into inverted commas” (258). Laila’s less-than-satisfactory interactions with the British in India help to contextualize Hosain’s lingering resentment over the condescending reaction to her English writing when she was still in India (and probed years later in her on-air conversation with Rose-Mary Clifford). By reading the broadcasts and novels of Chitale and Hosain together, we can see how the transformation of India from colony to republic involved rigorous contestation of what constituted the home, what kinds of work were legible, and to what extent women emerged as citizens. Returning to the interwar years, both novelists attempt to rescript not just the independence movement but also the failure of the postcolonial state to live up to its promises of gender equality. Chitale’s and Hosain’s engagement with the technical possibilities

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of radio, many of which they import into the novel, allow us in the present to reread their work and understand in a more nuanced way how these two writers connected the poles of the personal and the national. The so far occluded yet significant links between their fiction and broadcasting enrich the story of the Indian Anglophone novel and the role of women writers in shaping it.

EPILOGUE The Eastern Service in the Era of Decolonization

Postwar conditions—and a raft of changes to address them—attenuated the influence of the Eastern Service on the global Anglophone novel. With the exception of Attia Hosain, who continued to contribute to the Eastern Service through the 1950s, the other authors surveyed here moved on. As one BBC employee remembers, “months before the Germans acknowledged defeat, there was an air of packing up in the corridors and offices.”1 After being largely exiled to the Eastern Service, James Joyce’s work was increasingly taken up on the Home Service and the Third Programme.2 E. M. Forster found the freedom he had enjoyed on the Eastern Service replicated on the new Third Programme, to which he shifted his attention. After Some Books wrapped up and Forster offered greetings following Partition in 1947, he gave twenty-two talks on the Third, though—speaking to the extent of the crossover from the Eastern Service to the Third—some in the late 1940s were given on overseas services and simply rebroadcast on the Third.3 Both Mulk Raj Anand and Venu Chitale headed to India, Chitale to publish In Transit within a few years and Anand to continue his rapid pace of publication and edit the magazine Marg, which he founded in 1946 and is still published today. On the administrative side, George Orwell resigned in 1943, penned Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), and died shortly thereafter in 1950. Zulfiqar Ali (Z. A.) Bokhari traveled to the United States to investigate

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film opportunities but decamped soon afterward to his new position as director-general of Radio Pakistan. And Donald Stephenson, who had set up the BBC’s first office in New Delhi, became the new director of the Eastern Service in 1945, thus ending the reign of Rushbrook Williams. But it was much more than a change in personnel that altered the Eastern Service after 1947. For the BBC external services as a whole, the 1950s were a period of decline. From its preeminent position during the war, in peacetime the BBC reduced staff, programming hours, and offices in response to cuts to the government’s grant-in-aid, “which covered both capital and running costs [and which] fell sharply in real terms between 1947 and 1952.”4 The government’s ability to select the languages of transmission and its ownership of transmitters allowed it to direct more attention to areas of immediate political significance: the Arabic Service as well as programs for Soviet and Eastern European audiences.5 The BBC advocated for increased programming to India and China but was met instead with instructions to reduce costs. A notable exception was the growth in services to Africa, with Gerard Mansell dubbing the 1960s the “decade of Africa.”6 But barring this notable exception, the reduction in broadcasting hours, staff, offices, and languages meant that the BBC lost its preeminence, outperformed by the United States and the Soviet Union, seeing itself as “sunk to a parlous condition by the mid-fifties.”7 Making matters worse, the 1950s were a period of new opportunity, as the proliferation of cheap transistor radios meant an unparalleled number of listeners. The general decline of the BBC’s external services in the 1950s was coupled with changes to programming that closed the book on the high seriousness and Anglophone bent of the wartime Eastern Service. Donald Stephenson wrote from India in 1957 to argue “that the regionalized English services, which had dominated pre-war and war-time broadcasting, were becoming increasingly irrelevant”; he proposed instead that the audience of the General Overseas Service be reimagined as an “English-speaking but foreign native” audience.8 Instead of directing a robust English-language service at the subcontinent (as Bokhari had done), under the new plan the Eastern Service shifted its resources toward broadcasting in native languages, with the English-language programming moving to the General Overseas, which would no longer be aimed at British expats but at the native elites. Further, managers such as Mansell innovated new styles of programming, shifting, in his words, “from the longer, more leisurely talks to

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a livelier journalistic presentation in which impromptu everyday speech took over from the polished, scripted microphone performances of the past.”9 Without discontinuing cultural programming, the Eastern Service nonetheless shifted its emphasis toward news and programming in native languages, away from Anglophone literary programs, and even away from the comparatively formal tone of the book talk. Despite the Eastern Service’s physical distance from the subcontinent, it could not escape Partition. Although it broadcast in Hindustani until 1949, after this point it was split into separate Indian and Pakistan sections.10 Rather than increasing English-language content, which could conceivably appeal equally to both countries, the two sections were instead tasked with the production of content specifically for their national audience (and in Urdu for Pakistan, with Hindi, for instance, now aimed at an Indian audience alone). Attia Hosain, disillusioned with this move and in mourning for a united India, increasingly distanced herself from the Eastern Service, which more than any of the other changes marks the conclusion of the period under investigation in this book. As I suggested above, some of the energy and freedom of the Eastern Service was rechanneled into the new, domestic, high-culture Third Programme. One way to track the Eastern Service’s influence is in terms of personnel: Hosain, Forster, and many others (particularly contributors to the Eastern Service’s Book of Verse program such as T. S. Eliot, Stephen Spender, James Stephens, Dylan Thomas, Vernon Watkins, and V. S. Pritchett, to name just a few) made the transition to the Third. But the Eastern Service’s impact is registered in the Third’s programming as well. John Lehman’s literary magazine of the air, New Soundings, was based on Voice. Another mainstay of the Third Programme, Imaginary Conversations—which Kate Whitehead attributes to Rayner Heppenstall—was imported via the Eastern Service; in 1942 Orwell wrote an “Imaginary Interview: George Orwell and Jonathan Swift,” which was both part of a longer-running series and reprinted in the Listener, where Heppenstall—yet another contributor to the Eastern Service—likely saw it.11 The impact of the Eastern Service is less significant for Features and Drama, since these were already independent departments with histories of innovation that predate the creation of the Eastern Service.12 Nonetheless, in its cultivation of critics, poets, and fiction writers, its global vision of contemporary Anglophone literature, and its remediation of print periodicals (in book reviews, essayistic talks,

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magazines of the air, imaginary conversations, and so on), the Eastern Service had a profound influence on the Third’s literary programming. STUCK WITH THIS RADIO METAPHOR

As I have suggested, the influence of the Eastern Service on postwar British literary programming—and by extension the British literary field—was significant. But its effects echo in the Indian novel as well, even as the BBC’s cultural significance diminished in relation to All India Radio. No novel captures the ascendance of AIR and the accompanying reduction of the influence of the BBC on Anglophone Indian letters quite like Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children.13 Though Midnight’s Children clearly inherits and extends the intermedial conversation between broadcasting and the novel as form surveyed in the previous pages, with its protagonist given the magical ability to both broadcast and listen-in to anyone on the subcontinent, significantly, this power is imagined as paralleling that of AIR, not the BBC. As a child, Saleem Sinai, after accidently inhaling a pajama cord, is transformed into “a radio receiver,” with the ability to “turn the volume down or up . . . select individual voices . . . even, by an effort of will, switch off my newly-discovered inner ear” (186). Whereas for Chitale and Hosain the formal possibilities of radio provide a means of structuring the soundscape and linking the personal and the national, for Rushdie the connection is concretized: Saleem becomes a radio, and a national one at that. The novel, which won the Booker Prize in 1981 and the Best of the Booker Prize in 2008, has amassed a sizable body of scholarship that I won’t rehash here except as it pertains to radio and the novel, a relationship that has been largely overlooked in the efforts to trace the novel’s historical and literary references, its shifting of the market position of postcolonial literature, or its break into a chutnified English. Saleem can not only “pick up the children’s transmissions” and “broadcast [his] own messages” but also “act as a sort of national network, so that by opening [his] transformed mind to all the children [he] could turn it into a kind of forum,” one that he later likens to the “lok sabha or parliament” (259). Striking here is the strictly national context: like the broadcasting services of all fledgling postcolonial states, AIR is here conceived as a technological analog to parliament, a “national network” in more than one sense.

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The competition between the two is relegated to the same realm as it is in Finnegans Wake: to the struggle for national form. In other words, does the novel best represent the nation, or is it instead the national broadcaster? Reading Saleem’s radiophonic abilities within the context of Freudian psychoanalysis and stressing the unreliability of the senses, Ankhi Mukherjee argues that Rushdie challenges “the official, positivist history that constitutes the nation with the unofficial one transmitted unreliably by nerve endings.”14 So Saleem’s personal experience is more telling than the official history, and the novel is closer to reality than AIR’s broadcasts. As I suggested earlier, on the face of it, the novel seems to win in the case of Midnight’s Children. There is no need to marshal Midnight’s Children as a national allegory: the novel anticipates—even begs for—such treatment. Born, like India and Pakistan, at midnight on August 15, 1947, the narrator and protagonist Saleem presents himself as “mysteriously handcuffed to history,” his “destinies indissolubly chained” to those of his emergent country (3). And if this isn’t convincing, no less a personage than Nehru writes to confirm it: congratulating Saleem on the moment of his birth, he writes, “We shall be watching over your life with the closest attention; it will be, in a sense, the mirror of our own” (139). Like the thousand other children born during the first hour of the new nation, Saleem has been granted magical powers. During the course of the novel, however, almost all these children are killed off, while those few who survived until the Emergency are sterilized. As Saleem argues, “There were a thousand and one possibilities which had never been present in one place at one time before; and there were a thousand and one dead ends” (230). In short, the children represent the myriad possibilities of the fledgling nation, which, instead of turning into the vibrant democracy envisioned by Nehru and Saleem, falls into a totalitarian state accompanied by “suspension-of-civil-rights, and censorshipof-the-press, and armored-units-on-special-alert, and arrest-of-subversiveelements” (481). Given the “censorship-of-the-press” during the Emergency of 1975–1977, AIR was reduced to a government mouthpiece, which Midnight’s Children links to the contemporaneous mass sterilization campaign such that when Saleem is forcefully sterilized he also loses his radiophonic abilities for good. Rather than unite the nation in all its pluralities, the radio is used to impose a single national narrative. Not so the novel, however, which gathers the voices of possibility, the voices silenced during the Emergency.

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While the novel captures the ascendant cultural position of AIR in postcolonial India, with the BBC becoming a smaller player, it suggests not that the novel has transcended radio, but rather that the two are intertwined to an unprecedented degree. What emerges from a consideration of Midnight’s Children in the context of the previous pages is the extent to which the novel continues a much longer-running process of remediation that includes writers such as Mulk Raj Anand, Attia Hosain, and Venu Chitale. In Midnight’s Children, however, the radio becomes the controlling metaphor for the personal/national connection as well as the primary competition with the novel as form. Midnight’s Children is thus the most extreme and self-aware example of the process of remediation traced throughout Radio Empire. As Saleem tellingly admits, “I seem to be stuck with this radio metaphor” (259). Not only is Saleem stuck with the radio metaphor, but the novel is as well. In the diegesis, the novel is addressed orally to Padma after Saleem loses his ability to broadcast and listen-in (what we read is supposedly Saleem’s notes from these oral presentations). While Saleem’s act of narration clearly builds on the oral tradition in India, as many commentators have pointed out, the fact that Saleem produces written scripts for his performances is almost entirely overlooked. Midnight’s Children is not a return to orality; instead, like a broadcast talk, it is an exemplary instance of secondary orality. Instead of an oral epic, Midnight’s Children is a novel, and a bildungsroman at that. While the novel borrows characters and plots from Hindu source texts, its structure nonetheless emerges from the capacities of print. Saleem’s work-around in the face of his loss of the ability to broadcast captures the ambivalence between the two media forms: it appears that the novel is transcendent in serving as the vessel for Saleem’s story (better than radio, because still functional), even though within the diegetic world this is only because Saleem has lost his radio power (which he preferred, and which unlike the novel was magical). But from a further remove, we see that the manner in which he writes the novel is borrowed from radio, as is its initial delivery as a (scripted) oral performance for Padma. Like a BBC talk, it is scripted and practiced until it appears to be extemporaneous. Of course, and as I have argued throughout, thinking of these two media forms as strictly in competition with each other misses the point: what Midnight’s Children reveals above all is that the novel as form—at least at this point in historical time—is inconceivable without the counterweight of broadcasting.

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SAM SELVON AND THE DEMANDS OF THE BROADCAST MEDIUM

In the introduction I laid out an argument for decoupling the Eastern Service from the Caribbean Service. My rationale there arises from a reservation that the political and aesthetic requirements of the two were significantly different, stemming from divergent conceptions of audience. In particular, as I’ve shown in the preceding pages, there was no equivalent to Henry Swanzy in the Eastern Service. From L. F. Rushbrook Williams to Z. A. Bokhari, Malcolm Darling, and George Orwell, to the unofficial house critic E. M. Forster, there was no overarching aesthetic mold for the work, but rather a propaganda imperative to appeal to university students and the English-speaking elites throughout the subcontinent. Forster, for instance, did not decide whose work was broadcast or who read on air—his remit was limited to the books he reviewed, and even there he took suggestions from colleagues. The Eastern Service’s perceived need to serve students resulted in the coexistence of canonical literature with the latest Indian writing, whereas Caribbean Voices in particular was exclusively interested in new, contemporary writing. Most noticeably absent, however, was the imperative for “local color” that characterized Caribbean Voices during Swanzy’s tenure. Further, the Indian English novel predated the existence of the BBC’s Eastern Service—the Indian English novel had both nineteenth-century precursors as well as a “classical” period in the interwar years with the work of Mulk Raj Anand, R. K. Narayan, and Raja Rao. In contrast, barring a few cases such as C. L. R. James’s Minty Alley (1936)—the first novel by a black West Indian published in London—the Caribbean novel boomed simultaneously with Caribbean Voices: the early novels of V. S. Naipaul, Sam Selvon, and George Lamming were all written alongside their BBC scripts and then reviewed over the air. Returning to the years before Caribbean Voices and the different conditions at the Eastern Service presents a wider array of possibilities for understanding the remediation of the novel and radio. In contrast to both Joyce and Chitale, who clearly borrowed from radio form in crafting their novels, Hosain used broadcasting as an opportunity to advertise her work and address issues affecting its reception. Unlike the other authors in my study, however, Hosain stages a return to the novel before its transformation by radio. In other words, the case of Hosain brings to light something central

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about Forster as well: that while both accept—even embrace—radio’s ability to spread the novel to readers in geographically disparate locations and even a wider class formation (although mostly in theory rather than practice), they simultaneously disavow radio’s impact on the form of the novel itself. Whereas Forster turned to reviewing books out of frustration over his inability to publish queer fiction, in Hosain’s case she separates the two media forms as a strategy to counter the reductive narratives into which she was placed as a broadcaster, with the novel emerging at this late stage as a medium concerned with the individual. In what follows, I want to give one last example of media convergence, one that tempers a split presaged by Hosain, and—significantly—one that is newly visible given the work essayed in the previous chapters. The juxtaposition of writing from various literary traditions with contemporary work—despite the fact that this is what empire radio was doing—has generally been ignored in favor of a more narrow focus on radio’s contribution to the use of vernacular. By way of concluding the investigation into the intermediality of literature and shortwave, then, I here bring the lessons from the previous chapters to bear on one of the celebrated writers on Caribbean Voices, Sam Selvon, reconnecting the insights from the study of the Eastern Service to the larger field of empire broadcasting. Whereas this book’s initial move was to isolate the Eastern Service, here I return the insights from that move to the later Caribbean Service as a necessarily tentative gesture toward the wider applicability of the model laid out in this book. Selvon got his start as a writer in Trinidad, editing the literary section of the Trinidad Guardian and placing short stories in local magazines, moving to London in 1950 and immediately joining the cast of writers on Caribbean Voices. Selvon placed forty pieces with the program and was frequently employed by Swanzy as a reader when his own work wasn’t included. After publishing two novels based on life in Trinidad, A Brighter Sun (1952) and An Island is a World (1955), Selvon turned to the experiences of immigrants to London from the West Indies. According to his account of his third novel, The Lonely Londoners (1956), he tried to compose the novel in Standard English but found it “just would not work.”15 I’m skeptical of this claim, however, as the early radio version of the novel, “Come Back to Grenada,” is in precisely the synthetic vernacular deployed so famously in The Lonely Londoners. Broadcast on Caribbean Voices on June 5, 1955, the

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story was both written and read by Selvon. In Naipaul’s introduction, he explains that another Selvon story, “Calypsonian,” was one of the “most successful stories we ever put on Caribbean Voices,” and that the new story employs the same “modified dialect.”16 The Lonely Londoners alters a number of plot points and condenses some of the characters in “Come Back to Grenada.” For instance, the main character George is from Grenada, but— like the novel’s Moses—he lives in a basement room in Bayswater, works in a factory packing pot scrubbers, and serves as the social hub for the boys, who “used to drop round to have a old talk, especially on a Sunday morning.”17 Although the character names and backgrounds are altered, the broadcast story contains many of the same events that receive more elaborate treatment in the novel: the difficulties of finding work and housing because of the color bar, the loneliness of city life and the perennial debate about returning to the West Indies, but also the re-creation of home in certain shops thanks to familiar foods and the chance to share gossip. Selvon also offers an early version of conflict between Scottie, who tries to assimilate and organizes fêtes, and the other characters, who embarrass Scottie by refusing to pay admission and who dance in West Indian style, or “jock waist for so . . . only to make Scottie get vex” (4).18 In addition to the recurring characters and plot points, however, the story is framed as a collection of the “episodes coming up in the old talk in George room” (6). In other words, the radio story presents a series of anecdotes, the form of which, when re-created in The Lonely Londoners, results in “more of a ‘ballad’ than a straight novel.”19 That said, there is a major departure in the novel that is worth attending to: the long, unpunctuated stream-of-consciousness passage about the summer. In “Come Back to Grenada,” the listener is told about some of George’s pleasures: “Then in the summer he putting on jitterbug shirt and walking about, coasting all by Hyde Park in the night, standing up by the corner near Marble Arch listening to them fellars who does stand up on box and say wyat they like and no policeman don’t interfere with them, and eyeing every sharp craft that standing up near, waiting to ask she if she would come in the yard for a cup of tea” (10). In contrast to the bleak winters, when George stays in bed under a pile of blankets to escape the cold, in summer he roams Hyde Park listening to political speeches and trying to woo women. As is the case for the novel’s Moses, these summer joys counteract his desire during the winter to return to the West Indies. But

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unlike in the novel, here the summer reveries are recalled in a short passage. In contrast, the “summer is hearts” passage of The Lonely Londoners is a nine-page sentence that—in its unpunctuated style, its many “yeses,” and its fascination with sex—most clearly calls to mind Molly Bloom’s monologue in the “Penelope” episode of Joyce’s Ulysses.20 On the face of it, then, this appears to be an instance of media divergence: whereas radio is often deployed for the kind of vernacular dialogue of the “ballads,” stream-of-consciousness is primarily novelistic. That this is so would seem to be confirmed by the fact that, before expanding on Moses’s story in the subsequent novel Moses Ascending (1975), Selvon revisited the characters and situations depicted in The Lonely Londoners in a series of seven radio plays he wrote for the BBC in 1969. While the radio plays present Moses and the other characters in both new and familiar events, they noticeably avoid the style of the “summer is hearts” passage from The Lonely Londoners. In the later plays, Galahad recites the phrase “Summer is hearts in Londontown, Boy,” but he is immediately interrupted by dialogue between Moses and other characters.21 The closest the later plays come is in one of Moses’s statements to the journalist interviewing him before his departure to Trinidad: You see, it was summer, and when the old sun shinin’ on Londontown, is as if the whole world change, and things don’t look so grim as they did in the cold and the fog of winter. You could see them old geezers come to sit down in the park . . . and everywhere you turn you seeing the girls in summer frocks, and birds singing, and all the trees put back on their clothes, and even you yourself could sport a pair of cotton slacks and a hot shirt, and forget about the winter woollies and coats. The boys get on as if they gone mad, just dashing about town like blue flies.22

While Moses’s statement carries the spirit of the “summer is hearts” passage, it is spoken aloud to another character in the diegesis and—again—is nowhere near as long and rambling as in the novel. There are a number of reasons to read this by the lights of media divergence, then, not the least of which is that Selvon deploys stream-ofconsciousness technique only in the novel version of this text. Both the preceding radio story, “Come Back to Grenada,” and the subsequent series of radio plays, Eldorado West One, omit it. Further, stream-of-consciousness was considered anathema to many working in the orbit of Caribbean Voices.

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Edgar Mittelholzer, in an introduction to Selvon’s story “The Rhapsody” on Caribbean Voices, argues that “despite James Joyce and Dylan Thomas, critical taste insists on productions which are coherent. . . . If a story is incomprehensible, if it sounds like jargon, it simply won’t be read . . . therefore writers cannot afford to be affected and ‘high-brow.’ ”23 Years earlier, Alfred Mendes had criticized Basil McFarlane’s story “Christopher” as a “substandard imitation of the Joycean stream-of-consciousness technique.”24 Selvon seems to have remembered this sort of criticism when crafting his radio work; according to Glyne Griffith, “the demands of the broadcast medium helped to foster admonitions from the members of the Critics’ Circle that short stories begin in medias res, and that short, declarative statements and brief, realist depictions rather than lengthy abstractions be employed.”25 It would seem, then, that stream-of-consciousness and radio are anathema. But this is to misrecognize social use as technical possibility. Griffith’s account gives too much agency to “the broadcast medium,” which here “demands” a specific style. In fact, between the time Selvon came to London and the publication of The Lonely Londoners, the BBC produced thirtythree Joyce programs. Of particular interest, however, are a number of programs to coincide with Bloomsday in 1954, including most significantly a performance of the “Hades” episode, which—though it includes dialogue—is primarily in the stream-of-consciousness style that Ulysses made famous.26 Just because Selvon did not include the Joycean section in the radio versions of his text does not mean that radio didn’t inspire its inclusion in the novel. As I have argued across the preceding chapters, the intermediality of print and broadcast includes literary forms like the novel as well as journalistic forms such as the talk. Though the critics on Caribbean Voices were quite clear about the proper relationship between radio and literature, we should be more cautious. The BBC, in addition to encouraging writers to transpose formal elements into and out of radio and the novel, was also a site for the promotion of colonial writers to other colonial writers. Even as we acknowledge the propaganda value of positing London as the center of imperial exchange and English literature as a “universal” medium, we should not turn a deaf ear to the impact of empire broadcasting on literature, especially for someone like Sam Selvon, who worked extensively in both mediums, adapting his texts in and out of broadcast and print.

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In one of Selvon’s first Caribbean Voices appearances, he debated with other writers the merits of creating a canon of Caribbean literature. Selvon astutely asked: “What will happen if we fence ourselves in to particular ways of writing prose and poetry if we build a tradition?”27 Radio Empire has been motivated by the same question. Reconsidering the fertile experiments on and around the Eastern Service has, I hope, helped to reanimate it.

NOTES

INTRODUCTION 1. Mulk Raj Anand, The Big Heart (London: Hutchinson, 1945), 51. 2. Anand, The Big Heart, 73. 3. This crossover extends beyond remediation, with the novel serving as an extended meditation on the role of intellectuals in social movements. Elsewhere, Singh worries that “you many know by instinct, and from the heart, and act upon your knowledge while I may just be dithering” (Anand, The Big Heart, 72). 4. Anand, The Big Heart, 51. 5. “Considering the small number of writers we have in comparison with the large population of India, I would like to see a world in which the energy and the genius of the people is released from the shackles.” Mulk Raj Anand, “Meet My Friend, No. 4: Mulk Raj Anand Introduces Inez Holden,” BBC Eastern Service, June 17, 1942, typescript, BBC Written Archives Centre (hereafter BBC WAC), 8. For more on Holden’s reception, see Kristin Bluemel’s introduction to Inez Holden, Blitz Writing: Night Shift & It Was Different at the Time, ed. Kristin Bluemel (Bath: Handheld Press, 2019). 6. Anand, “Meet My Friend, No. 4,” 2. 7. Lisa Gitelman and Geoffrey Pingree, “Introduction: What’s New About New Media?,” New Media, 1740–1915 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003), 13. 8. As Lisa Gitelman suggests, “looking into the novelty years, transitional states, and identity crises of different media stands to tell us much, both about the course of media history and about the broad conditions by which media and communication are and have been shaped.” Gitelman, Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006), 1. 9. In addition to the scholarship on radio and the novel cited in the coming pages, see Jonah Willihnganz, “The Voice of America in Richard Wright’s Lawd Today!,”

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in Broadcasting Modernism, ed. Debra Rae Cohen, Michael Coyle, and Jane Lewty (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2009), 124–41. For a wider consideration of sound and the modernist novel, see Angela Frattarola, Modernist Soundscapes: Auditory Technology and the Novel (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2018). 10. James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (London: Faber and Faber, 1939), 309.14. 11. Connecting Bowen’s experience at the microphone with one of her late novels, Allan Hepburn argues: “Bowen learned acoustic techniques, such as the inclusion of noise, music, and ambiguous conversation that carried over to her writing of The Little Girls.” Allan Hepburn, “Acoustic Modernism: BBC Radio and The Little Girls,” Textual Practice 27, no. 1 (February 2013): 144. Linking Bowen’s late novels and broadcasts with a focus on the specter of obsolescence, Emily Bloom argues that “Bowen embarked on a campaign . . . to retrain readers and to retrain herself as a writer in an anti-nostalgic mode that could reclaim the ‘now’ for a print literature that seemed increasingly relegated to the past.” Emily Bloom, The Wireless Past: Anglo-Irish Writers and the BBC, 1931–1968 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 94. 12. Debra Rae Cohen, “Annexing the Oracular Voice: Form, Ideology, and the BBC,” in Broadcasting Modernism, ed. Debra Rae Cohen, Michael Coyle, and Jane Lewty (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2009), 147. 13. As Jessica Berman points out, a “proliferation of vernaculars, voices, and musical variety on All India Radio . . . challenges the dominance of the BBC’s imperial version, at least in the Indian situation.” Berman, “Re-routing Community: Colonial Broadcasting and the Aesthetics of Relation,” in Modernist Communities Across Cultures and Media, ed. Caroline Pollentier & Sarah Wilson (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2019), 252–53. 14. Friedrich Kittler, Discourse Networks 1800 / 1900, trans. Michael Metteer (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2005). 15. Raymond Williams, “Culture and Technology,” Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformists (New York: Verso, 1989), 120. 16. David Thorburn and Henry Jenkins, “Introduction,” in Rethinking Media Change: The Aesthetics of Transition (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003), 3. 17. Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999), 15. 18. Bolter and Grusin, Remediation, 33–34. 19. Bolter and Grusin, Remediation, 4. 20. Julian Murphet, Multimedia Modernism: Literature and the Anglo-American Avant-garde (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 5, 13, 22. 21. Tim Dwyer, Media Convergence (New York: Open University Press, 2010), 3; Benjamin Birkinbine, Rodrigo Gómez, and Janet Wasko, Global Media Giants (New York: Routledge, 2017), 2. 22. Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York: NYU Press, 2006), 2. 23. Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-Philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature, trans. Anna Bostock (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1971), 80.

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24. For an overview of the use of avant-textes, see Jed Deppman, Daniel Ferrer, and Michael Groden, eds., Genetic Criticism: Texts and Avant-textes (Philadelphia: University of Pennylvania Press, 2004). 25. “The epitext is any paratextual element not materially appended to the text within the same volume but circulating, as it were, freely, in a virtually limitless physical and social space.” Gérard Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 344. 26. Genette, Paratexts, 344. 27. Jerome McGann, The Textual Condition (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991), 13. 28. David Bennett, “Periodical Fragments and Organic Culture: Modernism, the Avant- Garde, and the Little Magazine,” Contemporary Literature 30, no.  4 (Winter 1989): 480. 29. Suzanne Churchill, The Little Magazine Others and the Renovation of Modern American Poetry (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2006), 23. 30. Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker, introduction to The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 6. 31. Eric Bulson, Little Magazine, World Form (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017), 2, 15. 32. D. F. McKenzie, Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 12. 33. Asa Briggs, “Empire and Overseas,” The Golden Age of Wireless (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 369–410. For the history of the Empire Service, particularly in its relationship to the Commonwealth and dominions, see Simon Potter, Broadcasting Empire: The BBC and the British World, 1922–1970 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). 34. Gerard Mansell, Let Truth Be Told: 50 Years of BBC External Broadcasting (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1982), 95; Asa Briggs, The BBC: The First Fifty Years (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 194. 35. Asa Briggs, The War of Words (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 464. 36. G. C. Awasthy’s history of broadcasting in India credits Lionel Fielden for realizing “the potentialities of radio as an art form.” Awasthy, Broadcasting in India (Bombay: Allied Publishers Private, 1965), 59. 37. Anwar Dil, ed., On This Earth Together: Ahmed S. Bokhari at UN, 1950–1958 (San Diego: Bookservice, 1994), 15. Nonetheless, Fielden regretted his choice, later writing that “the appointment of Ahmed Shah was, I now think, the worst mistake I ever made in India.” Quoted in Dil, On This Earth Together, 249. Despite the connection, however, All India Radio rebroadcast on average only 3.5 hours a week of  BBC programming. The Ministry of Information had a Far Eastern Bureau that controlled AIR programs during the war, causing further jealousy at the BBC. Briggs, War of Words, 249, 462. The Eastern Service also competed with transcriptions, recorded programs mailed out for local stations to play, which were organized by the Joint Broadcasting Committee (JBC) and operated under the auspices of the Foreign Office, not the BBC. The director of the JBC was Hilda Matheson, formerly of Talks. J. B. Clark, afraid that the JBC threatened the BBC’s monopoly, managed to absorb it, creating the London Transcription Service on

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October 1, 1941. Mansell, Let Truth Be Told, 197; see also Briggs, The War of Words, 168–70. 38. For instance, Fielden remembers making scrambled eggs for Nehru and his sister one night because they couldn’t get food in Gandhi’s camp. Lionel Fielden, The Natural Bent (London: Andre Deutsch, 1960), 197. 39. Fielden, quoted in Mansell, Let Truth Be Told, 36. 40. Fielden, The Natural Bent, 215. 41. The employment of the two brothers led to AIR earning the nickname BBC, for Bokhari Brothers Corporation. 42. Fielden, The Natural Bent, 219. 43. Briggs, War of Words, 460. Malcolm Darling was at odds with both Fielden and Bokhari; Fielden left the BBC in August 1940, but Bokhari stayed on and clashed with Darling (who had moved to Wood Norton). Darling threatened to resign if Bokhari’s powers were extended, so the Indian service was moved under the Eastern Service with Rushbrook Williams as director from September 1941. 44. Briggs, War of Words, 452. Rushbrook Williams was succeeded by C. J. Morris in July 1944. Briggs, War of Words, 454–55. 45. Briggs, War of Words, 458. Additionally, in April 1942 Laurence Brander was sent to conduct listener research, accompanied by Ahmed Ali. Rushbrook Williams was less than impressed with the results, possibly out of irritation over Brander’s report that “at the moment we are not winning the radio war that rages every night . . . the Axis are concentrating on this field with skill and energy.” Brander, quoted in Briggs, War of Words, 460, 464. 46. Edward Pawley, BBC Engineering, 1922–1972 (London: BBC, 1972), 249. 47. Briggs, War of Words, 446. 48. Government of India Memorandum on the proposed Hindustani Service by the BBC, April 4, 1940, quoted in Mansell, Let Truth Be Told, 206. 49. Mansell, Let Truth Be Told, 207–8. 50. Mansell, Let Truth Be Told, 206. 51. George Orwell, quoted in Briggs, War of Words, 463. 52. Quoted in Mansell, Let Truth Be Told, 208. 53. Variously the General Forces Programme or General Overseas Service, it was rapidly expanded in 1943, serving as “a Home Service for British listeners abroad,” thus allowing “the regional English services to concentrate more narrowly on their own intended audiences.” Mansell, Let Truth Be Told, 195; Briggs, War of Words, 446. But in anticipation of this change, starting in 1941, the BBC had a policy of “increased specialization” for the various Empire Services, which R. A. Rendall, director of Empire Services, split into discrete segments. Briggs, War of Words, 447. All these people worked under J. B. Clark, the controller of overseas, who had blocked Fielden’s appointment as Eastern Service director. 54. Potter, Broadcasting Empire, 1, 7. 55. Gauri Viswanathan, Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 167. 56. Stanley Wolpert, A New History of India (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 334–35. 57. George Orwell, “Poetry and the Microphone,” in Essays, ed. Peter Davison (New York: Knopf, 2002), 857.

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58. Z. A. Bokhari, “Publicity Plans for India,” quoted in Babli Sinha, “The BBC Eastern Service and the Crisis of Cosmopolitanism,” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 39, no. 2 (2019): 312. 59. Mark Wollaeger, Modernism, Media, and Propaganda: British Narrative from 1900 to 1945 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006), xiv. 60. Stephen Pasqualina, “ ‘That Can Never Be History’: Gertrude Stein and the Speed of the Reading Machine,” Modernism/Modernity 26, no. 1 (2019), 23. 61. Damien Keane, Ireland and the Problem of Information: Irish Writing, Radio, Late Modernist Communication (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2014), 10, 12, 13. 62. Sinha, “The BBC Eastern Service and the Crisis of Cosmopolitanism,” 311. 63. Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996); Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2008); Dilip Gaonkar, ed., Alternative Modernities (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001). 64. Jed Esty, Unseasonable Youth: Modernism, Colonialism, and the Fiction of Development (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 198. 65. Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone, 2005), 97. 66. Zadie Smith, interview by Philip Dodd, BBC Radio 3, November 22, 2016. 67. Zadie Smith, “E. M. Forster, Middle Manager,” a review of The BBC Talks of E. M. Forster 1929–1960; originally in New York Review of Books (2008), reprinted in Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays (New York: Penguin, 2009), 14–28. For convenience, I cite the latter. 68. Orwell resigned in a letter on September 24, 1943, likely in response to a memo stating that there were fewer than 156,000 radios in India, a country of millions. George Orwell, Two Wasted Years (London: Secker & Warburg, 2001), 358. 69. During World War II, the BBC edited a collection of broadcast talks but placed it with a well-known publisher: E. M. Forster, Richie Calder, Cedric Dover, et al., Talking to India, ed. and intro. George Orwell (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1943). The book was likely supported at least in part by the Ministry of Information. For a discussion of similar schemes, see Valerie Holman, “Carefully Concealed Connections: The Ministry of Information and British Publishing, 1939–1946,” Book History 8 (2005): 197–226. The BBC also published annual yearbooks, pamphlets, and other books. 70. Nasia Anam, “Introduction: Forms of the Global Anglophone” Post45, February 22, 2019. 71. Akshya Saxena, “A Worldly Anglophony: Empire and Englishes,” Interventions 20, no. 3 (2018): 318. 72. Sam Selvon interviewed by John Thieme and Alessandra Dutti. “Oldtalk: Two Interviews with Sam Selvon,” Caribana 1 (1990): 71. 73. Edward Kamau Brathwaite, History of the Voice: The Development of Nation Language in Anglophone Caribbean Poetry (London: New Beacon Books, 1984), 87. George Lamming, too, remembers the significant contribution of Swanzy: “Our sole fortune now was that it was Henry Swanzy who produced ‘Caribbean Voices.’ At one time or another, in one way or another, all West Indian novelists have benefitted from his work and his generosity of feeling. . . . No comprehensive account

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of writing in the British Caribbean during the last decade [the 1950s] could be written without considering his whole achievement and his role in the emergence of the West Indian novel.” Lamming quoted in Glyne Griffith, The BBC and the Development of Anglophone Caribbean Literature, 1943–1958 (New York: Palgrave, 2016), 14. 74. Peter Kalliney, “Metropolitan Modernism and its West Indian Interlocutors,” Commonwealth of Letters: British Literary Culture and the Emergence of Postcolonial Aesthetics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 116–45. Paul K. SaintAmour discusses the use of this photograph as a “methodological touchstone or escutcheon” in modernist studies, a “portrait of the weaker social ties that facilitate more diverse and attenuated clusters.” Saint-Amour, “Weak Theory, Weak Modernism” modernism/modernity 25, no. 3 (2018): 450. 75. Kalliney, Commonwealth of Letters, 5. 76. Griffith, Anglophone Caribbean Literature, 4. 77. Griffith, Anglophone Caribbean Literature, 3, 39. 78. Brathwaite, History of the Voice, 17. See also Mladen Dolar, A Voice and Nothing More (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006); Tsitsi Jaji, Africa in Stereo: Modernism, Music, and Pan-African Solidarity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014); and—for an introduction to the study of sound—Jonathan Sterne, The Sound Studies Reader (New York: Routledge, 2012). 79. Griffith, Anglophone Caribbean Literature, 2. 80. Only after Orwell left the BBC’s Eastern Service did the possibility for radio to make poetry “more of a spoken and less of a written thing” fully sink in. Orwell, “Poetry and the Microphone,” 865. This despite the fact that in one of Orwell and Anand’s Eastern Service literary programs, Voice, the Jamaican poet Una Marson read some of her vernacular poetry. If Orwell was slow to realize the possibilities of the broadcast medium for vernacular writing, this was not the case for Marson, who created Caribbean Voices. The connection is widely acknowledged, but for the most detailed discussion, see Delia Jarrett-Macauley, The Life of Una Marson (New York: Manchester University Press, 1998). Indeed, part of my motivation for comparing the two is that Marson created Caribbean Voices by drawing on her experience broadcasting on the Eastern Service. Though many subsequent scholarly accounts have been privy to this connection, it has actually worked to obscure several crucial distinctions between the Caribbean and the Eastern Service. 81. Michele Hilmes, “Rethinking Radio,” in Radio Reader: Essays in the Cultural History of Radio (New York: Routledge, 2002), 2. 82. As Emily Bloom reminds us, “although [the term] attempts to define the distinctiveness of the new medium, [it] reveals the extent to which new media are interpreted through the lens of the old—the concept of the ‘radiogenic’ simply applies the concept of the ‘photogenic’ from the earlier medium of photography to broadcasting.” Bloom, The Wireless Past, 4. For a comparative reading of the term (against the French radiogénie and the German funkisch), see Kate Lacey, Listening Publics: The Politics and Experience of Listening in the Media Age (Malden, Mass.: Polity, 2013), 92–95. 83. Aasiya Lodhi and Amanda Wrigley, “Introduction: Radio Modernisms: Features, Cultures and the BBC,” Media History 24, no. 2 (2018): 162.

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84. Louis MacNeice quoted in Ian Whittington, Writing the Radio War: Literature, Politics and the BBC, 1939–1945 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018), 83. 85. Whittington, Writing the Radio War, 85. 86. Bloom, The Wireless Past, 93. For another recent take on MacNeice’s features, see Aasiya Lodhi, “ ‘Countries in the Air’: Travel and Geomodernism in Louis MacNeice’s BBC Features,” Media History 24, no. 2 (2018): 226–38. 87. Lance Sieveking, The Stuff of Radio (London: Cassel, 1934), 26. Sieveking likely infuriated his colleagues in the Talks Department by claiming that “there is no essential difference between a broadcast talk and a talk of pre-radio days—that is, not in the fundamental technique of it” (25). 88. Whittington, Writing the Radio War, 67. 89. David Hendy, “Afterword: Radio Modernisms,” Media History 24, no. 2 (2018): 286. 90. Gitelman, Always Already New, 7, 6. 91. Michael Coyle writes: “His objection in these instances was not to the obtrusion of technology, but to the presentation of one kind of performance as another: the presentation of a formal lecture as a radio talk.” Though the BBC, too, was generally invested in the difference, they nonetheless broadcast occasional lectures, thus “simulating a larger public event rather than a private one.” Coyle, “This Rather Elusory Broadcast Technique: T. S. Eliot and the Genre of the Radio Talk” ANQ 11, no. 4 (1998): 34, 39. 92. Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (1982; New York: Routledge, 2002). 93. Todd Avery, Radio Modernism: Literature, Ethics, and the BBC, 1922–1938 (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2006), 23, 38, 36. 94. Hilda Matheson, Broadcasting (London: Thornton Butterworth, 1933), 75–76. 95. Matheson’s successor, C. A. Siepmann, continued the tradition: “It was Siepmann who thought of the talk as resting on a ‘double artifice.’ What was natural had to become artificial before it would sound natural again.” Briggs, The Golden Age of Wireless, 126. 96. This is one of many ways in which the talk is similar to print: Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, describes the audience of print publications in the same way. 97. Neil Verma, Theater of the Mind: Imagination, Aesthetics, and American Radio Drama (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 65. The genre of the talk continued to evolve after Matheson’s departure, with particular tension between “popular and serious forms not only in terms of style but also in terms of content.” David Cardiff, “The Serious and the Popular: Aspects of the Evolution of Style in the Radio Talk 1928–1939,” Media, Culture and Society 2, no. 1 (January 1980): 38. Each speaker landed in different slots on a spectrum between impersonality and intimacy. Throughout the 1930s, however, the BBC began to differentiate more forcefully between talks and lectures. As Cardiff uncovers, “the use of the impersonal style became the rule for expert speakers precisely because the BBC wished to avoid the accusation that it was allowing them to use radio to promote their personal opinions” (33). Paul Bloomfield, a talks assistant, admitted that class and perceived expertise were also contributing factors: “people of some importance” were able to resist the imperative toward the studied casualness of the talk. Bloomfield, BBC (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1941), 84. 98. Matheson, Broadcasting, 14.

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99. Avery, Radio Modernism, 44. 100. Verma, Theater of the Mind, 65. 101. Pawley, BBC Engineering, 109. 102. Paddy Scannell, “Television History: Questioning the Archive,” Communication Review 13, no. 1 (March 2010): 42. 103. “The microphones at many of the early stations were of the Peel-Conner carbongranule type made by the General Electric company . . . and were similar to those used in telephones. They were inherently noisy and gave very poor quality; they were also insensitive so that it was necessary to place them very close to the speaker to achieve sufficient output” (Pawley, BBC Engineering, 40). 104. Pawley, BBC Engineering, 120. 105. Engineering Division Training Manual (London: BBC, 1942), 66. 106. Paddy Scannell, “Introduction: The Relevance of Talk,” in Broadcast Talk (London: Sage, 1991), 8. 107. That the talk is a genre is further revealed by the fact that its protocol of liveness was often violated after it was established. Though E. M. Forster delivered many of his talks live over the air, after the bombardment of London made travel less predictable he recorded his talks in advance. Nonetheless, the other aspects of the talk genre—the intimate rhetorical address and proximity to the microphone— were retained. 108. Pawley, BBC Engineering, 135, 221, 137. 109. E1/915/4 Countries: India / Reception Reports / File 1d / 1940 and E1 / 915 / 4 Countries: India/Reception Reports / File 1b / January–June 1939, BBC WAC. 110. Paddy Scannell and David Cardiff, A Social History of British Broadcasting (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1991), xiii. 111. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), 5. Scannell and Cardiff, A Social History of British Broadcasting, xii, argue that “overseas broadcasting falls outside” their remit of a history of British broadcasting. Thomas Hajkowski, who considers the empire, nonetheless focuses on domestic representations of it in his The BBC and National Identity in Britain, 1922–53 (New York: Manchester University Press, 2010). For arguments that transnational radio has been comparatively understudied, see Stephanie Seul and Nelson Ribeiro, “Revisiting Transnational Broadcasting,” Media History 21, no. 4 (2015): 365–77; and Marie Gillespie, Alban Webb, and Gerd Baumann, “Broadcasting Britishness, Strategic Challenges and the Ecology of Overseas Broadcasting by the BBC,” Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television 28, no. 4 (July 2010): 453–58. A notable exception to the narrow focus on domestic broadcasting is Potter’s Broadcasting Empire. Nonetheless, Potter’s focus on the dominions means that writers of color are largely absent from his study. 112. Potter, Broadcasting Empire, 1. 113. Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 4. 114. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1994). 115. For example, see Melanie Micir, “Living in Two Tenses: The Intimate Archives of Sylvia Townsend Warner,” Journal of Modern Literature 36, no. 1 (Fall 2012): 119– 31; Carolyn Dinshaw, Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and

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Postmodern (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1999); Louis Niebur, Special Sound: The Creation and Legacy of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010); and Tara Rodgers, ed., Pink Noises: Women on Electronic Music and Sound (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010). 116. For more, see S. N. Clarke, “Virginia Woolf’s Broadcasts and Her Recorded Voice,” http://www.virginiawoolfsociety.org .uk /resources /virginia-woolfs -broadcasts -and-her-recorded-voice/. 117. The Manual for the Arrangement and Description of Archives, trans. Arthur H. Leavitt (1898; New York: H. W. Wilson, 1968). Even in the twenty-first century, the Dutch Manual “is usually regarded as a starting point of archival theory and methodology.” Peter Horsman, Eric Ketelaar, and Theo Thomassen, “New Respect for the Old Order: The Context of the Dutch Manual,” American Archivist 66 (2003): 249. 118. Scripts have been reproduced on microfilm, the most annoying of midcentury mediums. 119. Hilary Jenkinson, A Manual of Archive Administration Including the Problems of War Archives and Archive Making (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1922). Thanks to Paul Saint-Amour for pointing me to this work. 120. Asa Briggs, “The Historian and the Final Edit,” in Documents That Move and Speak: Audiovisual Archives in the New Information Age (New York: Saur, 1992), 35. 121. Fielden, The Natural Bent, 104–5. 122. To give just one example, the Third Programme recruited John Lehman to create a “literary magazine of the air,” one so clearly modeled on the Eastern Service’s Voice—discussed at length in chapter 3—that one of the two proposed titles for the latter program was Third Voices, which simply prefaces Voice with the title of the service. To build on Lehman’s success editing Penguin New Writing, however, the Third settled on the title New Soundings. Kate Whitehead, The Third Programme: A Literary History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 179. 123. Orwell, quoted in Whitehead, The Third Programme, 68. 124. Briggs, “The Historian and the Final Edit,” 33. 125. Briggs, The Golden Age of Wireless, 410. 126. Humphrey Carpenter, The Envy of the World: Fifty Years of the BBC Third Programme and Radio 3, 1946–1996 (London: Phoenix Giant, 1997). 127. These would include Briggs’s helpful suggestion of archiving a day’s programming rather than select programs thought to be of future interest, how he saw the BBC contributing “complimentary material to that placed in real or imaginary time capsules,” necessitated by the threat of nuclear annihilation (and thus participating in a longer history of protecting the archive from the threat of war); and most dramatically how he invokes the Judeo-Christian “last judgment” as an inspiration for the preparation of the archive. Briggs, “The Historian and the Final Edit,” 38. 128. V. S. Pritchett, “Modern Radio Drama: Book of Verse No. 64,” BBC Eastern Service, December 29, 1945, typescript, BBC WAC. 129. This trend is covered in more detail in Siân Nicholas, The Echo of War: Home Front Propaganda and the Wartime BBC, 1939–1945 (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1996).

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130. Helen Tiffin, “Post- Colonial Literatures and Counter-Discourse,” in The PostColonial Studies Reader, ed. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin (New York: Routledge, 2006), 99–101.

1. FINNEGANS WAVES 1. James Joyce, A First-Draft Version of Finnegans Wake, ed. David Hayman (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1963), 163. 2. Joseph Campbell and Henry Morton Robinson, A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1944), ix. 3. By the Wake’s letter, I refer to a defense of HCE penned by his wife ALP, which appears in several versions, as a report from “the old holmsted here” and later as “scriblings scrawled on eggs.” James Joyce, Finnegans Wake, 26.25, 615–19. Further citations are in the text, followed by page and line number. 4. Asa Briggs, The War of Words (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 666. 5. James Joyce, The James Joyce Archive, ed. Michael Groden et al. (New York: Garland, 1977–79), 31:97. Henceforth cited parenthetically as JJA, followed by volume and page number(s). 6. Though the use of characters in the Wake is quite complex, readers of this chapter need only know that HCE is the father of two rival sons, Shem and Shaun, and that the Four sit in judgment of HCE. 7. For a classic postcolonial reading of Finnegans Wake, one to which I am particularly indebted for its comparative study of Ireland and India, see Vincent Cheng, “The General and the Sepoy: Imperialism and Power in the Museyroom” in Joyce, Race, and Empire (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995). For readings through a media studies optic, see Eric McLuhan, The Role of Thunder in Finnegans Wake (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997); and Donald Theall, James Joyce’s Techno-Poetics (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997). 8. Sean Lester, Diary entry December 16, 1940, reprinted in Douglas Gageby, The Last Secretary General: Sean Lester and the League of Nations (Dublin: Town House, 1999), 225. 9. Michael Heffernan, quoted in Iarfhlaith Watson, Broadcasting in Irish: Minority Language, Radio, Television and Identity (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2003), 17. 10. Watson, Broadcasting in Irish, 21, 25. 11. Quoted in Richard Pine, 2RN and the Origins of Irish Radio (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2002), 157. 12. Pine, 2RN and the Origins of Irish Radio, 157. See also Maurice Gorham, Forty Years of Irish Broadcasting (Dublin: Talbot Press, 1967), 25. 13. For more on the Nicolson affair, see Patricia Hutchins, James Joyce’s World (London: Methuen, 1957), 175–78; Alistair McCleery and David Finkelstein, “Alfred, Lord Noyes, and ‘Ulysses,’ ” James Joyce Quarterly 39, no. 3 (Spring 2002): 558–62; and Todd Avery, Radio Modernism: Literature, Ethics, and the BBC, 1922–1938 (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2006), 33–74. For later BBC broadcasts related to Ulysses, see Rowley Newton, “Ulysses, Censorship and the BBC,” Yearbook of English Studies 20 (1990): 92–101.

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14. Alan Cohn and Richard Peterson, “Frank O’Connor on Joyce and Lawrence: An Uncollected Text,” Journal of Modern Literature 12, no. 2 (July 1985): 211–20. 15. Alistair McCleery, “The 1969 Edition of Ulysses: The Making of a Penguin Classic,” James Joyce Quarterly 46, no. 1 (Fall 2008): 59. 16. James Joyce, Letters of James Joyce, ed. Stuart Gilbert and Richard Ellmann (New York: Viking, 1966), 3:291–92. Further citations are in the text as L, followed by volume and page number. 17. Avery, Radio Modernism, 49. 18. Richard Ellmann, James Joyce, rev. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 669. 19. Louis Gillet, Claybook for James Joyce, trans. Georges Markow-Totevy (London: Abelard-Schuman, 1958), 21. 20. Quoted in Samuel Beckett, The Letters of Samuel Beckett, ed. Martha Dow et al. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 661. For more on this potential broadcast and Beckett’s involvement, see Susan Schreibman, “The Penman and His Bleaters,” in In Principle, Beckett Is Joyce, ed. Friedhelm Rathjen (Edinburgh: Split Pea, 1994), 1–19. W. B. Yeats gave broadcasts on BBC Belfast twice in 1931 and once in 1934; see Yeats, Later Articles and Reviews: Uncollected Articles, Reviews, and Radio Broadcasts Written After 1900, ed. Colton Johnson (New York: Scribner, 2000), 219–29, 249–53; as well as Emily Bloom, The Wireless Past: Anglo-Irish Writers and the BBC, 1931–1968 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 27–63. 21. When Ezra Pound wrote Joyce in the fall of 1937 asking for copies of Purcell’s sonatas, Joyce inquired, “Is any of this music vocal and for a low voice? If so perhaps Giorgio could sing it over the radio. He will broadcast from Poste Parisien on Tuesday next at 7.45 but of course he had to sing what they chose” (L1:397). Joyce’s note simultaneously plugs Giorgio’s upcoming broadcast and attempts to spread some of Pound’s promotional generosity to his son. 22. Joyce confided in Harriet Shaw Weaver, more than many of his other correspondents, concerning his children, and in a particularly personal letter, Joyce ties together his concerns about his influence with those of the radio: “On many sides I hear that I am and have been an evil influence on my children. But what are they doing away from that evil influence?” (L, 1:367). In the same letter Joyce betrays his concern that Giorgio is misunderstood, forced to play the stage Irishman, and that he might abandon his father and settle in America: “He went over to America, we were told, for four months. He has been there now a year. . . . He sang twice over the radio to the natives who love poor old Ireland and insist that, if he is to please them, he must forget all about the umusical [sic] countries of Europe and croon to them about Mother Machree and A Little Bit of Heaven” (L, 1:367). 23. Also in Giorgio’s absence, Joyce sent another copy of the Herald review to Radio Luxemburg and was pleased to announce that his son “made an excellent impression” and secured a regular appearance on the station (L, 3:410–11). 24. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1983; New York: Verso, 2006), 135. 25. Luca Crispi, Sam Slote, and Dirk Van Hulle, introduction to How Joyce Wrote Finnegans Wake: A Chapter-by-Chapter Genetic Guide, ed. Luca Crispi and Sam Slote (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2007), 5.

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26. James Joyce, “From Work in Progress,” transatlantic review 1 (1924): 215–23, 216, 217, 219, 220. Further references are cited in the text. 27. Jean-Michel Rabaté, “The Fourfold Root of Yawn’s Unreason: Chapter III.3,” in How Joyce Wrote Finnegans Wake: A Chapter-by-Chapter Genetic Guide, ed. Luca Crispi and Sam Slote (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2007), 395. 28. Bertolt Brecht, “Radio as a Means of Communication: A Talk on the Function of Radio,” trans. Stuart Hood, Screen 20, no. 3/4 (1979–80): 24. 29. In addition to the four gospellers, the excerpt in the transatlantic review refers to The Annals of the Four Masters, a chronicle of Irish history compiled in the seventeenth century. Of particular importance in “Mamalujo” is the Anglo-Norman invasion of Ireland in 1169 (often distorted to one of the Wake’s magic numbers, 1132). The division into four parts signals one of the structuring texts in the Wake, Giambattista Vico’s New Science. The Wake borrows a circular structure and division into four parts from Vico’s text, including a shorter summation of what came before—the ricorso—as the final section. At the end of the excerpt in the transatlantic review appears a hint of the Wakean language to come, rich in polylingual punning and portmanteaux: “and another more for old luke syne and she haihaihail her kobbor kohinor sehehet on the praze savohohole shanghai” (223). In keeping with the old men’s nostalgia, lines from “Auld Lang Syne” are subjected to different levels of distortion as they reappear in different sections; in this incarnation Luke and the song title are fused. Figuring prominently as well is Dion Boucicault’s play Arrah-na-Poghue, or Arrah of the Kiss, which narrates a prison break following the passage of a note—in a kiss—from Arrah to her imprisoned foster-brother. This kiss and that between Tristan and Iseult are variously combined in the memories of the Four. For more on other Wakean intertexts, see James Atherton, The Books at the Wake (New York: Viking, 1960). 30. Joseph Bédier, The Romance of Tristan & Iseult, trans. Hilaire Belloc and Paul Rosenfeld (New York: Vintage, 1994), 57. The first official broadcast from 2RN, on January 1, 1926, concluded with the Prelude and Liebestod from Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde; for more see Pine, 2RN and the Origins of Irish Radio, 149. 31. Bédier, Tristan & Iseult, 63. 32. These notes were central to the project throughout the sixteen years of composition; in the 1930s Joyce’s amanuensis copied the unused portions from his many notebooks to a new one so that he would have a single, convenient source for this material as he wrote and revised. 33. Vincent Deane, “Introduction to VI.B.10,” in The Finnegans Wake Notebooks at Buffalo: VI.B.10, ed. Vincent Deane, Daniel Ferrer, and Geert Lernout (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2001), 4. For more, see Hayman’s introduction in JJA, 31:xi–xviii. Of the “Tristan and Isolde” notes in this particular notebook, some were phrases that were incorporated and remained through book publication, like “love seat (1.5)” which appears in II.4 as a “fifteen inch loveseat” (384.22). Other phrases, such as “2 reel film / film goer / screenstruck” (31:132), remained unincorporated in the main text despite Tristan’s appearance as a film and rugby star. 34. The options presented in the note include a monologue becoming a dialogue, a dialogue becoming a monologue, two dialogues separated by two interruptions, and so on.

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35. For example, polylogue returns in morphed form in Finnegans Wake: “Pollylogue” (470.09). 36. When the Four are expanded in Finnegans Wake, they broadcast from the four different provinces, and (as was the case in Ireland at the time) in the context of rivalry between the three southern provinces (served by Radio Éireann) and Northern Ireland (served by the BBC). 37. Pine, 2RN and the Origins of Irish Radio, 44. 38. Roland McHugh, Annotations to Finnegans Wake (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 388. 39. Broadcasts began with an introduction similar to that of a phone call, with the BBC, for example, opening with “This is London Calling.” 40. Lisa Gitelman, Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006), 7. 41. John Bishop, Joyce’s Book of the Dark: Finnegans Wake (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993); James Connor, “Radio Free Joyce: Wake Language and the Experience of Radio,” in Sound States: Innovative Poetics and Acoustical Technologies, ed. Adalaide Morris (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997); Jane Lewty, “Q.R.N, I.C.Q: Joyce, Radio Athelone and the 3-Valve Set,” Hypermedia Joyce Studies 8, no. 1 (February 2007). 42. Friedrich Kittler, though, often overstates the importance of inscription technologies on literary creation, claiming of Rilke’s poem “Primal Sound,” for example, that the poem “leaves no doubt whatsoever about which contemporary developments were most important to literature in 1900. Instead of lapsing into the usual melancholic associations of Shakespeare’s Hamlet or Keller’s Green Henry at the sight of a human skull in candlelight, the writer sees phonographic grooves” (Kittler, Discourse Networks 1800 / 1900, trans. Michael Metteer [Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2005], 43). Unlike the phonograph, whose acts of inscription and reproduction could take place in private, the radio was emphatically public, always engaged with an audience that was large and uncountable. Readings of technology and the Wake have tended to take the book out of the world, or at least most of it. Instead, I show that the Wake’s engagement with radio reflects the geopolitical struggles of the interwar years as well as—in the novel’s wartime and postwar reception—changing conceptions of modernism, when the Wake was decoupled from the forbidding heights of international modernism and instead rescued or recuperated for the common reader as the work of a lone, idiosyncratic Irishman, James Joyce. 43. Campbell and Robinson, A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake, 196. 44. The description of Earwicker’s radio was added to II.3 in 1936 from notebook pages listing technical notes on the medium, likely culled from advertisements, for example: Bypass condenser Input voltage For all earth The 2nd being Twintriode Univalve

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As modern As tomorrow (JJA, 54:180) These notes, as well as an adjoining group under the header “ear,” were combined to form a paragraph (309.11–310.21) that links radio terms with parts of the human ear, suggesting in part how technology functions as prosthesis. 45. James Connor, “Radio Free Joyce,” 23. 46. Connor, “Radio Free Joyce,” 18. 47. Quoted in Jane Lewty, “Q.R.N, I.C.Q,” n.p. 48. The first drafts of II.3 weren’t completed until 1935, and the first draft of the opening radio description wasn’t started until December 1936. II.3, or “the scene in the pub,” continues the structural use of radio that was evident in “Mamalujo,” though this later chapter does so in a more pronounced fashion. The number of speakers and languages is increased dramatically, as are the number and type of interruptions. II.3 is, like most chapters, composed of a number of sketches combined: The first, “The Norwegian Captain” (309–332.35) recounts the story of a Norwegian sea captain who orders a jacket from a Dublin tailor for his wedding to a local girl. This tale is told by the publicans, who weave in accusations about the misconduct of the barkeep, Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker, one of the manifestations of HCE. It is possibly told by the Four, or at the very least—based on occasional characteristic expressions like “aped one . . . based two . . . seed three . . . And furthemore”—they seem to be listening to it (314.10–15). This tale concludes and Kate, who works at Earwicker’s bar, interrupts the festivities to summon HCE to his family. Next the patrons request “Butt and Taff,” a comic television duo who tell the story of “How Buckley Shot the Russian General.” This is followed by HCE’s monologue and conviction, followed by “Roderick O’Conor,” a tale of a miserly king who drinks the dregs from the bottles of his departed guests and appears almost unaltered from 1923 as the ricorso. Nonetheless, linking Roderick O’Conor with HCE, in a late edit Joyce added a “radio beamer tower and its hangars” to the description of the “house of the hundred bottles” (380.15–16). Like “Mamalujo,” II.3 started as a cluster of references in a notebook from 1923, VI.B.3, in this case to the comic story told by Butt and Taff, of an Irish soldier fighting in the Crimean War, “How Buckley Shot the Russian General.” See Crispi, Slote, and Van Hulle, How Joyce Wrote Finnegans Wake, 27. 49. The inaugural Christmas broadcast began: “Through one of the marvels of modern science, I am enabled this Christmas Day, to speak to all my peoples throughout the empire.” For more, listen to Rudyard Kipling, “Royal Christmas Speech,” read by George V, BBC Empire Service, December 25, 1932, Mixcloud. 50. James Joyce, “Continuation of a Work in Progress,” transition 15 (February 1929): 228. 51. In a few places Joyce elaborates earlier notes, adding “and turn widamost ear dreamily to the drummling of snipers, hearing” before his previous addition, “the wireless harps of sweet old Aerial and” (JJA, 61:412). 52. See Ireland folder at BBC WAC. 53. Damien Keane, “Contrary Regionalisms and Noisy Correspondences: The BBC in Northern Ireland Circa 1949,” Modernist Cultures 10, no. 1 (March 2015): 27. 54. This plays on a number of highly publicized escape attempts thwarted by wireless communication, some of which were further adapted for film. For more, see Paul

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Young, The Cinema Dreams Its Rivals: Media Fantasy Films from Radio to the Internet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006). 55. That said, I do not want to reduce the Four to 2RN; the fact that Northern Ireland complains about 2RN shows an important differentiation of the Four, which goes along with the Wake’s tendency to challenge and complicate essentialisms. 56. As in II.3, however, radio is used to suture two originally separate sketches—the interrogation of Shaun (as Yawn) and “Haveth Childers Everywhere.” 57. Many throughout his empire celebrate HCE’s 566th  birthday, echoing wellpublicized anniversaries broadcast throughout the British Empire (497.4–36). 58. F. R. Leavis, “Joyce and ‘The Revolution of the Word,’ ” Scrutiny 2, no. 2 (1933): 197, 193. 59. This is a conservative figure that includes only the sales reported to John Slocum and Herbert Cahoon when they compiled their Joyce bibliography. The first English edition of Finnegans Wake (Faber and Faber, 1939) sold 2,255 copies; from September 24, 1946, to May 31, 1948, Faber sold an additional 2,136 copies, but sales between the first edition and the 1946 reprint are not included. John Slocum and Herbert Cahoon, A Bibliography of James Joyce (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953), 60. An inquiry I submitted to Faber has not received a response. Details on the American edition are better known and show that it rapidly picked up steam in the 1940s. The 6,000 original copies were sold out by September 1943, when 1,000 additional copies were printed; these were followed by reprints of 2,000 in October  1944, 3,000 the following year, and 5,700 in March  1947. See Slocum and Cahoon, 61. Generally, the excerpts from Work in Progress did not sell as robustly, with the notable exception of Anna Livia Plurabelle (1930), which did well. The first English (Faber) edition sold 10,166 copies between 1930 and June 11, 1948 (Slocum and Cahoon, 45–46). Two Tales of Shem and Shaun (1932), in contrast, sold 3,849 copies (Slocum and Cahoon, 50); Haveth Childers Everywhere (1931) sold 249 copies in cloth and 5,341 in paper (Slocum and Cahoon, 54); and The Mime of Mick Nick and the Maggies (1934) sold out of its 1,000 print run. Slocum and Cahoon, 55. After 1947, however, selections from the Wake circulated widely in The Portable James Joyce (1947), edited by Harry Levin. The first American edition alone comprised 25,000 copies; in May 1948 Jonathan Cape printed the same collection as The Essential James Joyce. For more recent sales figures, see Peter Mahon, “Buying and Selling Finnegans Wake,” James Joyce Quarterly 44, no. 4 (Summer 2007): 800–806. Thanks to Nick Morris and Michael Groden for aiding in my inquiry. 60. Leavis, “Joyce and ‘The Revolution of the Word,’ ” 200. 61. Joseph Brooker, Joyce’s Critics: Transitions in Reading and Culture (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004), 86, 77. 62. Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses (New York: Viking, 1989), 343. 63. Eugene Jolas, “Revolution of the Word,” in Eugene Jolas: Critical Writings, 1924– 1951, ed. Klaus Kiefer and Rainer Rumold (1929; Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2009), 111–12. 64. Marcel Brion, quoted in Brooker, Joyce’s Critics, 55. 65. Jolas, “Revolution of the Word,” 79. 66. Jolas, “Revolution of the Word,” 86–87. 67. Joyce wrote to Beach: “Wireless is almost unknown here, it seems, so I could not listen in.” James Joyce, James Joyce’s Letters to Sylvia Beach, 1921–1940, ed. Melissa Banta and Oscar Silverman (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 121.

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68. Sylvia Beach, “Speech for the Institut Radiophonique d’extension universitaire,” in Letters of Sylvia Beach, ed. Keri Walsh (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 322–23. In keeping with Beach’s theme on French-American cooperation, transition was also the journal that began serializing Work in Progress earlier that year, after she approached Joyce on behalf of Jolas and Paul. Jolas remembers in his autobiography: One Sunday afternoon, at the end of 1926, Joyce invited Miss Beach, Mlle. Monnier, Paul, Maria and myself to his home in the Square Robiac, to listen to him read from the opening pages of his manuscript, which was subsequently to appear in the first issue of transition. He read in a well-modulated, musical voice, and often a smile went over his face when he reached a particularly witty passage. We were staggered by the revolutionary aspect of this fragment. . . . We nevertheless had complete faith in the ultimate value of the work, and were proud to contribute in a modest way to its unfolding. For more, see Eugene Jolas, Man from Babel (New Haven. Conn.: Yale University Press, 1998), 89. 69. Stephen Spender, “James Joyce: 1882–1941,” Listener (January 23, 1941): 124–25. 70. T. S. Eliot, “The Approach to James Joyce,” Listener (October 14, 1943): 447. 71. Michael Coyle, “This Rather Elusory Broadcast Technique: T. S. Eliot and the Genre of the Radio Talk,” ANQ 11, no. 4 (Fall 1998): 35. 72. T. S. Eliot, “Ulysses, Order, and Myth,” in Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot, ed. Frank Kermode (1923; New York: Harcourt Brace, 1975), 178, 177. 73. Eliot, “The Approach to James Joyce,” 447. 74. T. S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” in Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot, ed. Frank Kermode (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1975), 43. 75. Eliot, “The Approach to James Joyce,” 446. 76. Ezra Pound, quoted in Brooker, Joyce’s Critics, 13. 77. Eliot, “The Approach to James Joyce,” 446. 78. Eliot, “The Approach to James Joyce,” 447. 79. Eliot, “The Approach to James Joyce,” 446. 80. E. M. Forster, The BBC Talks of E. M. Forster: A Selected Edition, ed. Mary Lago, Linda K. Hughes, and Elizabeth Walls (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2008), 286, 287. 81. The first—as far as I can determine—was by Cyril Connolly, on the Home Service, November 29, 1940, typescript, BBC WAC. 82. L. A. G. Strong, Book of Verse: James Joyce, BBC Eastern Service, October 5, 1946, typescript, BBC WAC, 10; further references cited in the text. 83. James Stephens, The James Joyce I Knew, October 8, 1946, BBC [Home Service?], in James, Seumas & Jacques: Unpublished Writings of James Stephens, ed. Lloyd Frankenberg (New York: Macmillan, 1964), 149. 84. Joyce shares his discovery in a letter to Weaver: “The combination of his name from that of mine and my hero in A.P.O.T.A.A.Y.M. is strange enough. I discovered yesterday, through enquiries made in Paris, that he was born in Dublin on the 2 February 1882” (L, 1:254). 85. Although the two hadn’t yet decided on the details, Joyce is happy to report to Weaver that Stephens “seemed to be much impressed and moved by my proposal

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to hand over the work to him if I found my sight or the opposition demanded it and said I could rely on him to help me in anything. But he says I will do it and added that A. L. P. is the ‘greatest prose ever written by a man’ ” (L, 1:282). 86. Stephens, The James Joyce I Knew, 154. 87. Whenever possible I have, for the reader’s convenience, cited published versions of scripts rather than the copies at the BBC WAC. The beginning of this broadcast is reproduced in James, Seumas, & Jacques, but I quote from the BBC script wherever possible. Although the BBC script is damaged (particularly the bottom of the second page) and incomplete, it gives a better sense of how Stephens incorporated quotes from the novel; not only the quotes themselves, but Stephens’s comments on them were removed by the editor in James, Seumas, & Jacques. Similarly, the editor claims that comments on Joyce in the Ulysses broadcast were “almost identical [to those made in The James Joyce I Knew] and therefore omitted” (xxiii). Nonetheless, from the descriptions in the editor’s introduction, it seems that the typescripts of broadcasts in Stephens’s hands are more complete than those archived at the BBC. 88. James Stephens, Finnegan’s Wake, BBC Home Service, January 25, 1947, typescript, BBC WAC, 1–2, 3. 89. Stephens, Finnegan’s Wake, 1–2. Shelly Brivic argues that the Wake’s interest in Asia combats Orientalist stereotypes, thereby laying the groundwork for my own reading. See Brivic, “The Rising Sun: Asia in Finnegans Wake,” in Joyce Through Lacan and Žižek: Explorations (New York: Palgrave, 2008), 195–216. 90. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994). 91. Theall, James Joyce’s Techno-Poetics, 77–78. 92. Even before Eamon de Valera’s conservative Fianna Fáil Party came to power in 1932, the fledgling Irish state passed a series of censorship acts (most notoriously the Censorship of Publications Act of 1929), adding a government ban on items already prohibited by the Church. The “coupling system” simultaneously invokes the composers Bellini and Tosti as well as wireless pioneers Bellini and Tosi. This reference further suggests the martial applications of radio, as the Bellini-Tosi system, developed to help aircraft get bearings at night or in inclement weather, was used to help navigate zeppelins during the First World War. More than simply a way to ground the polyphonic narrative, the radio’s description here captures the contentious, even violent uses and debates over wireless. 93. Government reports touted the national service’s ability to spread the use of the Irish language, to “cultivate an Irish taste in the matter of the arts,” spread the “distinctive Irish character,” and, as President Douglas Hyde proposed, “to wipe out the foreign influence.” Hyde, quoted in Pine, 2RN and the Origins of Irish Radio, 116, 188.

2. REVIEWING SOME BOOKS 1. Narayana Menon, “Recollections of E. M. Forster,” E. M. Forster: A Tribute, ed. K. Natwar-Singh (New York: Harcourt, 1964), 3, 5. 2. Fredric Jameson, “Modernism and Imperialism,” in The Modernist Papers (New York: Verso, 2007), 159.

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3. Lionel Trilling, E. M. Forster (New York: New Directions, 1964), 9. 4. Menon, “Recollections of E. M. Forster,” 6. 5. Todd Avery, Radio Modernism: Literature, Ethics, and the BBC, 1922–1938 (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2006), 50, 51. 6. Avery, Radio Modernism, 51. 7. E. M. Forster, The BBC Talks of E. M. Forster: A Selected Edition, ed. Mary Lago, Linda K. Hughes, and Elizabeth Walls (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2008), 150. Hereafter cited in the text as BBC. As Peter Fifield puts it, “Both sympathetic and suspicious towards it, Forster’s broadcasts show a playful but humane experimentalism with radio address.” Fifield, “ ‘I Often Wish You Could Answer Me Back: And So Perhaps Do You!’: E. M. Forster and BBC Radio Broadcasting” in Broadcasting in the Modernist Era, ed. Matthew Feldman, Erik Tonnig, and Henry Mead (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 57. 8. Wendy Moffat, A Great Unrecorded History: A New Life of E. M. Forster (New York: Picador, 2010), 246. 9. Hear, for instance, The Spoken Word: British Writers, 3- CD set, British Library Sound Archive. 10. Audience Research Report, March 2, 1955, quoted in BBC, 44, 43. 11. BBC, 227. Forster announces the switch to recording ahead of time in his broadcast of June 20, 1943, when his talks are to be on Sundays instead of Wednesdays. Nonetheless, traveling to the BBC was dangerous throughout the war: Broadcasting House was bombed twice—once on October 15, 1940, with seven killed, and again when a landmine hit Portland Place on December 8, 1940. 12. As Forster’s scripts indicate, this became standard practice from November 21, 1944. 13. As early as 1976, Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane warned against an easy equivalence between experimental style and modernism: “Modernism is less a style than a search for a style in a highly individualistic sense.” Bradbury and McFarlane, eds., Modernism, 1890–1930 (1976; London: Penguin, 1987), 29. Forster continued his search after Passage, indeed over the long course of his broadcasting career. 14. Forster objected to R. A. Rendall “announcing that a talk is propagandist at its outset,” though Forster clearly had no qualms producing subtler propaganda (BBC, 24). 15. Ministry of Information Propaganda files, quoted in BBC, 21. 16. Scholars are right to point out that the Empire Service was initially imagined as an “organ of colonial discourse.” As Raymond Williams notes about new media, “virtually all technical study and experiment are undertaken within already existing social relations and cultural forms, typically for purposes that are already in general foreseen.” Williams, “Culture and Technology,” in Politics of Modernism (New York: Verso, 1989), 120. Italian experimenter and entrepreneur Guglielmo Marconi’s wireless telegraph was marketed to the British government specifically as a means of keeping the empire and the navy that maintained it in close and immediate contact. Furthermore, western Ireland served as the base for many of Marconi’s transmissions—initially directed to England—demonstrating the usefulness of wireless for keeping the colonies in touch with the homeland. When the technology for audio broadcasting was developed in 1920, it too inherited

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surrounding social relations and cultural forms, including (among many others) the structures of Britain’s economic, political, and social exploitation of its colonies. Charles Ritchie, a Canadian diplomat to Britain, identifies a cliché that nonetheless teases out these threads; playing on the rhythm of Morse code as well as conceptions of the body politic, wireless was commonly referred to as “the Pulse of the Empire.” See, for example, Ritchie, The Siren Years: A Canadian Diplomat Abroad, 1937–1945 (Toronto: Macmillan, 1974), 32. 17. “Media historians frequently adopt a national perspective blindly, without considering why this seems the natural and self-evident framework to employ.” Michele Hilmes, Network Nations: A Transnational History of British and American Broadcasting (New York: Routledge, 2012), 4. The same emphasis runs throughout the few discussions of Forster’s broadcasting career. Mary Lago’s “E. M. Forster and the BBC” paints a fascinating picture of Forster’s behind-the-scenes battles with the administration over both censorship and the inclusion of more cultural programming, his influence on the genre of the “Talk,” and the struggles of various programmers to get Forster to contribute to the Home Service. Although she mentions Forster’s Eastern Service broadcasts, correspondence between various BBC administrators and Forster concerning programs for the Home Service forms the bulk of Lago’s primary material. See Lago, “E. M. Forster and the BBC,” Yearbook of English Studies 20 (1990): 132–51. Her later biography of Forster presents slightly more material on his Indian broadcasts, including a short analysis of a broadcast from November 1940 concerning an exhibit of photographs of Hindu temples. Mary Lago, E. M. Forster: A Literary Life (New York: St. Martin’s, 1995). 18. Douglas Kerr, “Orwell’s BBC Broadcasts,” Textual Practice 16, no.  3 (Winter 2002): 474. 19. Avery, Radio Modernism, 73. 20. Mulk Raj Anand, “Attia Hosain: A Profile,” in Sunlight on a Broken Column (New Delhi: Arnold-Heinemann, 1979), x. 21. Jameson, “Modernism and Imperialism.” Ted Howell proposes a more robust take on Forster’s global vision in “An Imperialist Inherits the Earth: Howards End in the Anthropocene,” Modern Language Quarterly 77, no.  4 (December  2016): 547–72. 22. Graham Huggan, The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins (New York: Routledge, 2001), 59 (emphasis in original); Sarah Brouillette, Postcolonial Writers in the Global Literary Marketplace (New York: Palgrave, 2007), 24. 23. Néstor García Canclini, Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for Entering and Leaving Modernity, trans. Chistopher L. Chiappari and Silvia L. López (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), 211. 24. B. J. Kirkpatrick identifies 145 “talks” in her Forster bibliography. See B. J. Kirkpatrick, “E. M. Forster’s Broadcast Talks,” Twentieth Century Literature 31, no. 3 (Summer–Autumn 1985): 329–41. Not included in this tally are collaborative broadcasts such as the discussion “Efficiency and Liberty” with Captain Anthony Ludovici in 1938. For more on these broadcasts, see Lago, “E. M. Forster and the BBC,” 135; see also Lago, E. M. Forster, 92–130. 25. For Eliot’s Eastern Service broadcasts, which were either readings of his own work or reflections on British culture, narrowly defined, see Michael Coyle, “ ‘We Speak to India’: T. S. Eliot’s Wartime Broadcasts and the Frontiers of Culture,” in

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Broadcasting Modernism, ed. Debra Rae Cohen, Michael Coyle, and Jane Lewty (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2009), 176–95. 26. Forster similarly acknowledges the receipt of N. G. Jog’s Onions and Opinions (1944) on December 19, 1944. The BBC library was a major source for the titles Forster reviewed. Although he occasionally bought books published in India or received them in the mail, for the most part he selected— or George Orwell recommended—titles from the BBC’s collection. Much of the correspondence between the two writers centers around Forster’s neglect to return borrowed books in a timely fashion. 27. Another example of a comparative talk is the one from December 9, 1942, on V. K. Narayana Menon’s The Development of William Butler Yeats and T. S. Eliot’s “Little Gidding.” An “Indian” talk was given on July 3, 1946, with Forster reviewing Saratchandra Chatterji’s The Deliverance, Tarashankar Banerji’s Epoch’s End, Pramatha Chaudhuri’s Tales of Four Friends, and Rabindranath Tagore’s Farewell My Friend, as well as two anthologies and four critical studies. 28. Paul Jankowski, quoted in Anwar Dil, ed., On This Earth Together: Ahmed S. Bokhari at UN, 1950–1958 (San Diego. Calif.: Bookservice, 1994), 248. 29. Mulk Raj Anand, Conversations in Bloomsbury (1981; Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995), 4. 30. Menon, “Recollections of E. M. Forster,” 13. 31. Forster’s identification of “total war” continues an elaboration of the concept in the interwar years. As Paul Saint-Amour points out, the colonies were the scene of experimentation with “air policing” and the bombing of civilians, techniques tested for a future war involving Western cities. See Saint-Amour, Tense Future: Modernism, Total War, Encyclopedic Form (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 47–89. 32. For example, at the end of the war commentators “deplored the poor quality of wartime broadcasting” on the Home Service, “the simplistic comforts it had offered, the substitution of emotional solace for intellectual rigour.” Siân Nicholas, The Echo of War: Home Front Propaganda and the Wartime BBC, 1939–1945 (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1996), 274. 33. E. M. Forster, quoted in Lago, “E. M. Forster and the BBC,” 149. 34. Lord Ronaldshay, “India in Art and Literature,” Listener 1 (January 1929): 18. 35. Quoted in Lago, E. M. Forster, 232. 36. Edwin Muir, Review of The Bachelor of Arts, Listener 435 (1937): 944. Forster singled out The Bachelor of Arts in his annual review of books of 1937 for special praise as “so charming and so little known.” E. M. Forster, The Creator as Critic and Other Writings, ed. Jeffrey Heath (Toronto: Dundurn, 2008), 242. Hereafter cited as Creator followed by page number. Thanks to Todd Avery for pointing me to this collection. 37. Debra Rae Cohen, “Intermediality and the Problem of the Listener,” Modernism/ modernity 19, no. 3 (2012): 577. 38. H. A. L. Fisher, quoted in Peter Parker, Ackerley: The Life of J. R. Ackerley (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1989), 201–2. 39. J. R. Ackerley published Forster more than a collation of Forster’s bylines would indicate: “Me he helped constantly on The Listener to prosper me in my job, doing unsigned reviews for me in the days when the Book Chronicle was unsigned,

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although he disapproved of anonymity.” Ackerley, E. M. Forster: A Portrait (London: Ian McKelvie, 1970), 14. 40. The existence of these broadcasts is a salutary reminder that “the Western literary canon evolved out of a position of vulnerability, not strength.” Gauri Viswanathan, Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 168. 41. Despite the change of location, Forster didn’t significantly alter his style or content for his broadcasts from India. Forster’s first talk, “The Artist in the Postwar World,” continues a line he had long followed in his BBC broadcasts, arguing against an increased attention to politics and argumentation in fiction. Countenancing an “orgy of messages” in both England and India alike, he argues that the role of the artist is “to listen more carefully than most people, and to use his ears with detachment and passion” rather than to preach. See E. M. Forster, The Hill of Devi and Other Indian Writings (London: Edward Arnold, 1983), 283. If the first talk reflected in general terms on the changing literary world, the second, “Does Writing Pay?,” examines specific, practical aspects of copyright and publishing, offering support for writers’ groups like P.E.N. Although only these two scripts survive, the talk from Bombay, “Has India Changed?,” was transformed into a series of two talks given on the BBC Home Service upon Forster’s return, which were then reprinted in Two Cheers for Democracy. Both talks were printed in the Listener after they were given on the Home Service but before they appeared in Two Cheers. 42. See B. J. Kirkpatrick, A Bibliography of E. M. Forster (New York: Oxford, 1985), 250. 43. Thirty-one out of sixty-nine chapters originally appeared in the Listener. See E. M. Forster, Two Cheers for Democracy, ed. Oliver Stallybrass, vol. 11, Abinger ed. (London: Edward Arnold, 1972). Forster’s last major collection, The Hill of Devi (1953), continues the trend of publishing Indian material; it comprises edited letters from Forster’s first two trips to India. The Abinger edition (1983) includes significantly more material, including his diary from his third trip, when he broadcast for AIR in 1945. 44. “The epitext is any paratextual element not materially appended to the text.” Gérard Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 344. 45. Forster experimented with stream of consciousness technique in the collaborative “Story by Five Authors” (1942). The shift in focus to Forster’s broadcasts thus enables us to register the ways in which he was most innovative outside of fiction, but it also allows for the recovery of a significant piece of fiction written specially for the Eastern Service. E. M. Forster, L. A. G. Strong, Inez Holden, Martin Armstrong, and George Orwell, “Story by Five Authors,” in Orwell: The War Broadcasts, ed. W. J. West (London: Duckworth/BBC, 1985), 95–111. 46. These include Aspects of the Novel in 1927, a biography of his friend Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson in 1934, and a collection of essays, Abinger Harvest, in 1936. For more on Forster’s transition to criticism, see Rukun Advani, E. M. Forster as Critic (Dover: Croom Helm, 1984), 15. 47. The queer aspects of the Dickinson biography were purposely coded: “The biography remains faithful to Dickinson’s wish by avoiding explicit discussion of

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Dickinson’s homosexuality, although, as Oliver Stallybrass comments in his introduction to the Abinger edition of the biography, there are hints scattered throughout the book.” Tsung-Han Tsai, “Music as Queering in E. M. Forster’s ‘Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson,’ ” Music & Letters 99, no. 1 (2018): 1. For the biography as a site of queer activism, see also George Piggford, “Camp Sites: Forster and the Biographies of Queer Bloomsbury,” in Queer Forster, ed. Robert Martin and George Piggford (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 89–112. 48. E. M. Forster, Maurice (New York: Norton, 1971), 250. Instead, the novel enjoyed a limited circulation in manuscript and was published posthumously in 1971. 49. E. M. Forster, The Life to Come and Other Stories (New York: Norton, 1987), xiv. Forster also sought a model in the life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, telling his listeners in August 1931: “If you say poetry is greater than criticism, I agree. But if you say—as is often said—that Coleridge is a failure, because he turned from a poet into a critic, I shall dispute it. He had a double achievement, and he couldn’t scale the second peak until he had descended—painfully and with lamentation—from the first” (BBC, 65). 50. P. N. Furbank, E. M. Forster: A Life (New York: Harcourt, 1978), 211. 51. Even during Forster’s break from broadcasting to write the Dickinson biography, he was thinking of how the radio created publics. Writing to his publisher at Edward Arnold, Forster reflected, “I do want the book to be advertised and ‘pushed,’ in ways suitable to its character. I have got the idea that Dickinson, owing to his broadcasting, was on the edge of a much wider public, and I do want him to reach them.” Quoted in Forster, Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, vol. 13 of Abinger Edition of E. M. Forster, ed. Oliver Stallybrass (London: Edward Arnold, 1973), xiii. 52. Reith quoted in Furbank, E. M. Forster, 172. 53. An expurgated edition was not published in England until 1932, and the original Italian printing was difficult at best to acquire. Nonetheless, Forster referenced D. H. Lawrence approvingly in Eastern Service broadcasts on May 27, 1942, October 14, 1942, March 23, 1944, May 9, 1944, and November 20, 1946. Additionally, Forster’s original script for a Home Service talk on “New Books” on October 3, 1932, included a review of Aldous Huxley’s The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, but for reasons that are unclear, Forster replaced this section with one on Edith Sitwell’s The Pleasures of Poetry: The Victorian Age. See BBC, 84–85. 54. Both writers had works banned at the time of the broadcast. I discuss Nicolson’s broadcast on Joyce in more detail in chapter 1. For more on the ban on contemporary novels, see Avery, Radio Modernism, 47–50. 55. See Forster, Creator, 84. 56. Ulysses was available for the first time—legally—in the United States on January 25, 1934, but the novel was not widely available to the English public until the 1936 Bodley Head edition. 57. For Forster’s discussion of these figures, see Heard (BBC, 62); Buckingham (69); Dickinson (86); Lytton Strachey (118); Plomer and Isherwood (120). The letters between Forster and Isherwood contain many references to Forster’s broadcasting. Forster takes book suggestions from Isherwood and thanks him for mailing the translation of the Gita; see E. M. Forster and Christopher Isherwood, Letters Between Forster and Isherwood on Homosexuality and Literature, ed. Richard Zeikowitz (New York: Palgrave, 2008), 133.

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58. Forster broadcast on Benjamin Britten in 1946, but they were friends earlier through Isherwood. Britten bought Forster his first gramophone; see Moffat, A Great Unrecorded History, 278–79. Britten and Forster later collaborated on an adaptation of Herman Melville’s Billy Budd. Forster brought Bob Buckingham in for an Indian broadcast, echoing their earlier installment for Conversations in a Train. Joe Ackerley, part of a group of friends living in Maida Vale, took a job in  the BBC’s Talks Department in 1928 and in 1935 became literary editor of the  Listener. Ackerley worked for the Maharaja of Chhatarpur in 1923, thanks to  Forster’s connection. For more on Forster and Ackerley, see Furbank, E. M. Forster, 117, 135. For an overview of Lionel Fielden’s experiences in India, see Joselyn Zivin, “Bent: A Colonial Subversive and Indian Broadcasting,” Past & Present 162 (February  1999): 195–220. Fielden’s Beggar My Neighbor, reviewed favorably by Forster, was banned by the Indian government as “unadulterated pro-Congress and pro-Gandhi propaganda”; a bulletin issued by the Indian National Congress awarded it Book of the Year (quoted in Zivin, “Bent,” 218). 59. Kirkpatrick, “Forster’s Broadcast Talks,” 329. 60. Carolyn Dinshaw, Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and Postmodern (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1999), 21. 61. Melanie Micir, “Living in Two Tenses: The Intimate Archives of Sylvia Townsend Warner,” Journal of Modern Literature 36, no. 1 (Fall 2012): 129. 62. Forster published an anonymous article in the Nation and Athenaeum calling for an “effective protest” against the troubles faced by the Well of Loneliness, and he and Virginia Woolf signed a joint letter in the next installment criticizing the book’s suppression (Furbank, E. M. Forster, 154). Forster agreed to serve as the president of the National Council for Civil Liberties in 1934. His first major task was to combat the passage of a “Sedition Bill” that would make it illegal to disseminate or be in possession of literature “liable to seduce soldiers or sailors from their duty or allegiance” (quoted in Furbank, 188). He uncharacteristically urged people to join the organization, attend a rally, and write their MPs. In a broadcast in 1938, he cited the legislation as one of many threats to liberty in England (Forster, Creator, 245). For more on Forster’s involvement with the NCCL, see Furbank, 186–96. 63. In a striking passage, Forster argues for the frank depiction of Bakha’s work on commodes and streets: “The book seems to me indescribably clean and I hesitate for words in which this can be conveyed. Avoiding rhetoric and circumlocution, it has gone straight to the heart of its subject and purified it” (Mulk Raj Anand, Untouchable, ed. Saros Cowasjee [London: Bodley Head, 1970], v). For a less generous reading of Forster’s contribution, see Amardeep Singh, “The Lifting and the Lifted: Prefaces to Colonial Modernist Texts,” Wasafiri 21, no. 1 (Spring 2006): 1–9. 64. Forster’s defense of Raja Rao (in a reader’s report) is held in the Archive of British Publishing and Printing, Special Collections, University of Reading, UK. For more on Forster and Ahmed Ali, see Priya Joshi, In Another Country: Colonialism, Culture, and the English Novel in India (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 213–27. 65. Orwell’s warning may have been less than heartfelt; as a special branch report released in 2005 makes clear, “officers were also concerned that [Orwell] had

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offered BBC jobs to two other Indian figures who featured in their files: KS Shelvankar and Iqbal Gur Partab Singh. ‘The former turned it down as he did not think he would pass the ‘India Office security test,’ and the latter declined the invitation as he felt it might react unfavourably on his political career.’ ” Alan Travis, “How a Real Big Brother Kept an Eye on George Orwell, the Bohemian Communist,” Guardian, July 17, 2005. 66. This cultural borrowing went both ways, however. Tagore in particular was extremely influential in London, and Forster makes much of Yeats’s infatuation with him. In the broadcast on Jane Austen, Forster notes the death of L. H. Myers, who “found in sixteenth-century India, with its special contacts between Hindus and Moslems a fertile soil for his own subtle and philosophic talent, and he sought to express the problems of the twentieth century through that remote medium” (BBC, 296). Also of interest to Forster were more active collaborations like the translation of the Bhagavad-Gita by Christopher Isherwood and Swami Prabhavananda or Forster’s preface to Menon’s book on Yeats. 67. In Orwell’s mind, “the fate of the English language in Asia is either to fade out or to survive as a pidgin language useful for business and technical purposes . . . it is difficult to believe that it has a literary future.” Orwell, review of The Sword and the Sickle by Mulk Raj Anand, 1942, reprinted in George Orwell, Essays ed. Peter Davidson (New York: Knopf, 2002), 423–24. 68. Forster provided a preface to this book as well: K. R. Srinivasa Iyengar, Literature and Authorship in India (London: Allen & Unwin, 1943). The debate over English as an Indian language continues; as Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan wryly observes: “Anglophonists like me are not typically hired by South Asian studies programmes, since, to cite a recent job posting, such programmes expect that scholars work on ‘source materials’ in ‘indigenous languages.’ . . . English is still not considered a South Asian language by the disciplinary conventions of area studies.” Srinivasan, “Introduction: South Asia from Postcolonial to World Anglophone” Interventions 20, no. 3 (2018): 312. See also Nasia Anam’s explication of the counterintuitive role English plays in Bangladeshi writing, “Bangladeshi Anglophone Literature: Rerouting the Hegemony of Global English” Interventions 20, no. 3 (2018): 325–34. 69. Forster mentioned Joyce in at least two earlier talks on the Home Service. On July 4, 1941, he notes the deaths of Virginia Woolf, Hugh Walpole, and Joyce, “a writer with a vision of the universe which he expressed through recollections of his early life in Dublin” (BBC, 145). Forster first recommended Joyce to his Indian listeners on December 10, 1941: “Try James Joyce’s—no, I’m not going to say what you expect me to say; I’m not going to say ‘Ulysses.’ ‘Ulysses’ is a great work, but it is difficult to get, and difficult to understand. I’ll recommend you a volume of short stories by James Joyce called ‘The Dubliners.’ It is an early work, and semitrue and lovely, most particularly the story in it called ‘The Dead’ ” (BBC, 156). In another talk, on Mark Twain, Forster quotes a passage from Huckleberry Finn and prefaces it by saying, “Here’s the passage—and if you are a student of James Joyce you may be amused to detect in its artless prose an occasional premonition of the cadences of Ulysses” (BBC, 255). 70. Like Forster, I don’t take readers and writers to be mutually exclusive. As Michael Warner puts it: “Not texts themselves create publics, but the concatenation of texts

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through time. Only when a previously existing discourse can be supposed, and when a responding discourse can be postulated, can a text address a public.” Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone, 2005), 90. 71. Anand’s open letter to Forster in the early 1960s helpfully parses some of Forster’s seemingly incongruous beliefs and actions: You may recall that you were one of the few British writers who did not become the enemy of the movement for the inclusion of social and political causes which dominated the thirties. I know that you were skeptical about the aims of this movement. I realize that you did not wish us to go beyond certain limits, even in regard to Indian nationalism, because you were afraid that in our urge for freedom we might emulate European chauvinism. All the same, I remember that when I came to you, in your role as President of the Civil Liberties Union during the war, to get your signature on a petition against the then British Government’s torture of Jai Prakash Narayan, you willingly signed it. In effect, you have always held aloft the ideal of the primacy of conscience. And, disagreeing as we did on many moot points, you never ceased to give me your personal friendship, even though I seemed to you to be too passionate a radical, too rebellious a novelist, and too eccentric a personality. But you fought against censorship of all minds and made freedom of opinion possible in a difficult period. (“Open Letter to E. M. Forster,” in E. M. Forster: A Tribute, 45–46) 72. Forster reviewed Leon Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution over the BBC in the early 1930s, pointing out the paradox of Trotsky’s faith: “He regards only general laws as important, and the general law which (he believes) is now at work, ordains that the proletariat shall rule and that the proletariat alone can understand the proletariat. I don’t agree with him in that, by the way: observe instead that he is building up a new discipline under which Chaliapin will feel as uncomfortable as ever, and by which he himself will be expelled” (BBC, 113). Nonetheless, Forster headed the British delegation to the International Congress of Writers in Paris in 1935, where he gave a speech decrying the Obscene Publications laws, the Sedition Bill, and the extent to which British liberty was withheld from Indians, Africans, and the working class. Forster’s interest in the working class, however, did not take the same form as the majority of the other writers present, of alignment with communism, and he received a tepid response. Nevertheless, he agreed to give a paper at the entretien of the League of Nations’ Committee for Intellectual Co-operation in 1937. See Furbank, E. M. Forster, 221. Forster shared with his Indian listeners his meeting with Paul Valéry at the Defense of Culture meeting (BBC, 352) and discussed the meeting in more detail on the Home Service at the end of 1937; see Forster, Creator, 243–44. 73. “The Eastern Service Director was also given guidance regarding the famine: ‘(1) There is no general shortage of food in India—such as alone could justify such a step. (2) The war demands on shipping make diversion of transport inexpedient in view of 1.’ The official statements obviously trade in denial and evasion.” (Babli Sinha, “The BBC Eastern Service and the Crisis of Cosmopolitanism,” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 39, no. 2 (2019): 313.

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74. Damien Keane, Ireland and the Problem of Information: Irish Writing, Radio, Late Modernist Communication (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2014), 109. 75. Zadie Smith, “E. M. Forster: Middle Manager,” in Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays (New York: Penguin, 2009), 14–15. 76. Gerard Mansell neatly summarizes the position of the Eastern Service during the war: “Broadcasting from London could not provide an answer to the problem of India’s future or to its immediate political difficulties,” but it could suggest that “there was common ground of a more lasting kind between the English-speaking Indian intelligentsia and the world of culture and literature in Britain.” Mansell, Let Truth Be Told: 50 Years of BBC External Broadcasting (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1982), 209. 77. Not only did broadcasts organized by the Colonial Office disseminate their views, but the republication of these talks in the Listener gave them increased prominence, further circulation, and a venue to combine the scripts with visual elements like maps, charts, and propaganda posters. 78. For more on how the empire figured in BBC domestic programming, see Thomas Hajkowski, The BBC and National Identity in Britain, 1922–53 (New York: Manchester University Press, 2010), 19–82. 79. Siân Nicholas, “Brushing Up Your Empire: Dominions and Colonial Propaganda on the BBC’s Home Services, 1939–45,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth Studies 31, no. 2 (2003): 208. 80. Reginald Coupland, “The First British Empire and Its Fall,” Listener 247 (1933): 485. 81. H. V. Hodson, “Trusteeship for Native Interests,” Listener 329 (1935): 749. 82. Reginald Coupland, “Bird’s-Eye View of the British Empire,” Listener 381 (1936): 802, 803. 83. Hodson, “Trusteeship for Native Interests,” 749; Coupland, “Bird’s-Eye View of the British Empire,” 802. 84. Reginald Coupland, “The Dependent Empire,” Listener 387 (1936): 1088. 85. Karel Čapek writes: “There are four hundred million coloured people in the British Empire, and the only trace of them at the British Empire Exhibition consists of a few advertisement supers, one or two yellow or brown huxters and a few old relics which have been brought here for curiosity and amusement.” Čapek, Letters from England, trans. Paul Selver (1925; London: Geoffrey Bles, 1932), 69–70. 86. Parts of “Mosque” in A Passage to India, as well as other events in the novel, are based not on Forster’s travel in India but on experiences in Egypt. 87. For more see Moffat, A Great Unrecorded History, 179. 88. Mohammad Shaheen, “Forster Writes to the Empire and Salutes the Orient: A Passage Through Egypt,” in E. M. Forster and the Politics of Imperialism (New York: Palgrave, 2004), 58–74. 89. E. M. Forster, The Government of Egypt: Recommendations by a Committee of the International Section of the Labour Research Department, with Notes on Egypt by E. M. Forster (London: Labour Research Department, 1921), 3–4, 6. 90. E. M. Forster, Letter to Madan Blanchard (London: Hogarth Press, 1931), 12. 91. Forster, Letter to Madan Blanchard, 11–12. 92. Forster, Letter to Madan Blanchard, 21. 93. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage, 1993), 204.

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94. Edward Said, Orientalism (1978; New York: Vintage, 1994), 244. 95. Parts of Aziz as poet / writer were based on Masood, who published “Some Aspects of Urdu Poetry” in the Athenaeum in 1920 (Furbank, E. M. Forster, 119). 96. E. M. Forster, A Passage to India (1924; San Diego: Harcourt, 1999), 329. 97. Forster, A Passage to India, 360. 98. The novel served as an explicit model for intercultural friendship during the formation of All India Radio: “Fielden’s first encounter with the man who would become his second and intimate, Zulfaqar Bokhari, so closely mirrored Fielding’s with Aziz in Forster’s A Passage to India (1924) that one wonders if Fielden had choreographed it. In both cases, the young Muslim aspirant entered the white officer’s house while the latter was in post-bath undress and they formed a friendship on the basis of the officer’s ease and good fellowship under such awkward circumstances” (Zivin, “Bent,” 204). Bokhari lived with Fielden in London while both worked for the Eastern Service, but “if their personal motivations were to sustain an inter-racial and homosexual romance doubly reviled in India, then the move only partially worked. Though they lived together for the duration, their reputations from India followed them, and Fielden . . . quit after six months in the midst of a departmental feud and yet another nervous breakdown” (217). 99. Forster, A Passage to India, 362. 100. Amardeep Singh, “Re-Orienting Forster: Intimacy and Islamic Space,” Criticism 49 (Winter 2007): 36. 101. Edward Said, Representations of the Intellectual: The 1993 Reith Lectures (New York: Pantheon, 1994), ix. This is not the place for an analysis of the Arabic Service, but on its use to “project Britain,” see Peter Partner, Arab Voices: The BBC Arabic Service 1938–1988 (London: BBC External Services, 1988). The Arabic Service’s independence was aided by the existence of another Arabic station, Sharq al-Adna, which was “secretly operated by Her Majesty’s Government.” James Vaughan, “The BBC External Services and the Middle East Before the Suez Crisis,” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 28, no. 4 (2008): 501. 102. For more on the importance of the BBC to Said’s childhood, see Said, Out of Place: A Memoir (New York: Vintage, 2000), 35, 96, 100, 151, 204. 103. Cyril Connolly, Enemies of Promise (1938; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 86. 104. Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2002), 95. 105. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry Into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger (1962; Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991), 160. 106. Habermas, Structural Transformation, 164. 107. Habermas, Structural Transformation, 164. 108. In contrast, Adorno’s relationship to radio is much more complicated than is indicated by the positions expressed in Dialectic of Enlightenment. See, for example, his study of American right-wing radio, The Psychological Technique of Martin Luther Thomas’ Radio Addresses (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2000), and the recently published collection on radio music, Current of Music: Elements of a Radio Theory, ed. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Malden, Mass.: Polity, 2009).

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109. Debra Rae Cohen and Michael Coyle, “Introduction: Broadcast Traces/Tracing Broadcasting: Modernism and Radio,” Modernist Cultures 10, no. 1 (2015): 3. 110. Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999), 60. 111. Habermas, Structural Transformation, 36–37. According to BBC estimates, in 1940 there were about 100,000 radios in India, for a population of over 400 million. (Mansell, Let Truth Be Told, 209). 112. Lago, E. M. Forster, ix. 113. E. M. Forster, “The Freedom of the BBC,” New Statesman, April 4, 1931.

3. THE END OF EMPIRE 1. Susheila Nasta, “Sealing a Friendship: George Orwell and Mulk Raj Anand at the BBC (1941–43),” Wasafiri 26, no. 4 (2011): 15. For a much more detailed account of Anand’s years in Britain, see Nasta, “Negotiating a ‘New World Order’: Mulk Raj Anand as Public Intellectual at the Heart of Empire (1924–1945),” in Resistances in Britain 1838–1947, ed. Rehana Ahmed and Sumita Mukherjee (New York: Continuum, 2012), 140–60. 2. Ruvani Ranasinha, “South Asian Broadcasters in Britain and the BBC: Talking to India (1941–1943),” South Asian Diaspora 2, no. 1 (2010): 66. In the postcolonial state, this elite audience contributed disproportionately to the media: “Both in India . . . as well as other decolonizing ‘new nations’ of the third world, the free press of the postindependence period was positioned as a partner of the developmentalist state in a common project of modernizing and uplifting the people as citizens and eventually consumers.” Paula Chakravarty and Srirupa Roy, “Mediatized Populisms—Introduction,” International Journal of Communication 11 (2017): 4080. 3. Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker, The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 2. 4. Anand, letter to Orwell, November 15, 1942, Contributor file: Mulk Raj Anand, BBC Written Archives Centre, Caversham, Reading (hereafter BBC WAC). 5. Jane Marcus, Hearts of Darkness: White Women Write Race (New Brunswick, N.J.:  Rutgers University Press, 2004), 181. See also Elleke Boehmer, Empire, the National, and the Postcolonial, 1890–1920 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 169–214. 6. There is a robust, and growing, scholarly discussion of the impact of colonial intellectuals on metropolitan Britain stemming from works including Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995); Susheila Nasta, Home Truths: Fictions of the South Asian Diaspora in Britain (New York: Palgrave, 2002); Bill Schwarz, ed., West Indian Intellectuals in Britain (New York: Manchester University Press, 2003); and Simon Gikandi, Writing in Limbo: Modernism and Caribbean Literature (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1992). 7. Nasta, “Negotiating a ‘New World Order,’ ” 154. 8. Kate Lacey, Listening Publics: The Politics and Experience of Listening in the Media Age (Malden, Mass.: Polity, 2013), 125.

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9. Melissa Dinsman, Modernism at the Microphone: Radio, Propaganda, and Literary Aesthetics During World War II (New York: Bloomsbury, 2015), 100. 10. Paul Rabinow, French Modern: Norms and Forms of the Social Environment (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989), 289. 11. As the war drew to a close, on the Home Service “there was more popular Variety than ever before, and light and dance music now had an established place in the schedules, even on Sundays.” Siân Nicholas, The Echo of War: Home Front Propaganda and the Wartime BBC, 1939–1945 (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1996), 274. In contrast, the Third drew inspiration from the Eastern Service. Though this point escapes other historians of the BBC, Kate Whitehead’s literary history of the Third is a notable exception in its inclusion of frequent quotation from the Eastern Service’s George Orwell and the identification of innovative programming, including Voice, “the first broadcast ‘little magazine’ on the Indian Service”; see Whitehead, The Third Programme: A Literary History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 159. In addition to drawing on the experimental content of the Eastern Service, the founders of the Third either came from or sought the advice of Empire Service employees. Two of three central figures in the formation of the Third, Leslie Stokes and Etienne Amyot, both worked for overseas services during the war; John Morris, who later ran the Third, first helmed the Far Eastern Service. 12. Whitehead, The Third Programme, 179. 13. Quoted in Gerard Mansell, Let Truth Be Told: 50 Years of BBC External Broadcasting (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1982), 208. 14. Mulk Raj Anand, “London as I See It,” BBC Eastern Service, February 14, 1945, typescript, Contributor file: Mulk Raj Anand BBC WAC, Caversham, Reading, 2. Further references cited in the text. 15. By all accounts, Anand’s time with the BBC was a fertile one. While there he published Letters on India (1942), The Sword and the Sickle (1942), The Barber’s Trade Union and Other Stories (1944), The Big Heart (1945), and various contributions to edited collections and periodicals, not to mention the performance, by the Unity Theatre Company, of his play India Speaks: Map of India in 1943. Not only was Anand integrated into the literary circuit of the BBC, but he was well-known in larger literary circles, befriending George Orwell while serving in the International Brigade in the Spanish Civil War in addition to working as a copy editor at Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press and T. S. Eliot’s Criterion. Anand was published in many of the well-known periodicals of the time, including Penguin New Writing, Fortnightly Review, Life and Letters To-day, the Listener, and New Statesman, and his books were published by the likes of Faber and Faber, John Murray, Allen & Unwin, Lawrence & Wishart, Penguin, and Jonathan Cape. E. M. Forster provided the foreword to Untouchable (1935), and Anand’s retrospective Conversations in Bloomsbury (1981) recalls his conversations with the Woolfs, Eliot, Clive Bell, Aldous Huxley, D. H. Lawrence, Nancy Cunard, and many other figures. 16. Helen Tiffin, “Post- Colonial Literatures and Counter-Discourse,” in The PostColonial Studies Reader, ed. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin (New York: Routledge, 2006), 99–101. 17. Bertolt Brecht, “Radio as a Means of Communication: A Talk on the Function of Radio,” trans. Stuart Hood, Screen 20, no. 3/4 (1979–80): 24.

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18. Mark Morrisson, The Public Face of Modernism: Little Magazines, Audiences, and Reception 1905–1920 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001), 10. 19. Eric Bulson, Little Magazine, World Form (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017), 3. 20. Bulson makes some headway in this direction, even if Marinetti’s attempt to create a Radia futurista was severely limited by government control of radio stations: between 1932 and 1943 Marinetti averaged only about ten broadcasts per year. Bulson, Little Magazine, World Form, 261. 21. “A little magazine is a magazine designed to print artistic work which for reasons of commercial expediency is not acceptable to money-minded periodicals.” Frederick Hoffman, Charles Allen, and Carolyn Ulrich, The Little Magazine: A History and a Bibliography (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1947), v. The editorial board could make such judgments confidently. Tambimuttu and Eliot edited two of the most well-known literary periodicals, Poetry London and the Criterion, respectively. In fact, like Criterion and the American Dial, Voice disseminated parts of Eliot’s monumental The Waste Land (1922). For more, see Michael Coyle, “ ‘We Speak to India’: T. S. Eliot’s Wartime Broadcasts and the Frontiers of Culture,” in Broadcasting Modernism, ed. Debra Rae Cohen, Michael Coyle, and Jane Lewty (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2009). 22. Suzanne Churchill and Adam McKible, eds., Little Magazines & Modernism: New Approaches (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2007), 4. 23. James Keery, “The Apocalyptic Poets, ‘New Modernism,’ and ‘The Progressive View of Art’: Poetry London (1939–51) and Indian Writing (1940–2),” in The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, ed. Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 883. 24. George Orwell, All Propaganda Is Lies: 1941–1942, vol. 13 of The Complete Works of George Orwell, ed. Peter Davison (London: Secker & Warburg, 1998), 459. Further references cited in text as All followed by page number. 25. Nicholas, Echo of War, 43. 26. Iqbal Singh et al., “Commentary,” Indian Writing: A Quarterly 1, no. 1 (1940): 3. 27. Melba Cuddy-Keane, “Introduction: Are Too Many Books Written and Published?,” PMLA 121, no. 1 (2006): 236–37. 28. The poem is incorrectly listed as “September, 1941” in the typescript. 29. George Orwell, Keeping Our Little Corner Clean: 1942–1943, vol. 14 of The Complete Works of George Orwell, ed. Peter Davison (London: Secker & Warburg, 1998), 17. 30. Mulk Raj Anand, quoted in Orwell, Keeping, 17. 31. William Empson, quoted in Orwell, Keeping, 19. 32. In fact, Empson’s position was more complicated but likely simplified here for the sake of a more dramatic script. Empson requested a transfer from the Monitoring Service (where he worked as a subeditor) to the Far Eastern Service (whose creation and general approach to propaganda he had a large part in shaping) because of a long-standing interest in, and extended visits to, China. Further, Orwell, Empson, and Anand were on friendly terms, going for drinks after broadcasts and continuing the debates essayed in Voice. In 1989 Anand affectionately shared one such conversation with Empson’s biographer, John Haffenden; see Haffenden, William Empson, vol. 2: Against the Christians (New York: Oxford University Press,

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2006), 52–53. Nonetheless, Empson had not kicked free of every tenet of Orientalism: “Empson was sympathetic to the cause of Indian freedom but made a point of asking Anand whether, in the event that the British were to quit India, the Indians were really capable of running a democracy for themselves” (51). 33. Orwell, Keeping, 22. 34. Mulk Raj Anand, quoted in Orwell, Keeping, 22. 35. George Orwell, The War Broadcasts, ed. W. J. West (London: Duckworth, 1985), 57–8. In the earliest days of the Eastern Service, however, some listeners complained about Hindustani broadcasts as “too light in tone and too flimsy in material,” peppered with “undignified quips and jibes” at the enemy. Telegram from Government of India Home Department to Secretary of State for India, quoted in Mansell, Let Truth Be Told, 207. 36. Inez Holden attended a dinner with Anand and Orwell in November 1941, during which Orwell was beginning to convince Anand to join the BBC. Kristin Bluemel, George Orwell and the Radical Eccentrics (New York: Palgrave, 2004), 18. 37. Brooker and Thacker, Oxford History of Modernist Magazines, 2. 38. Babli Sinha, “The BBC Eastern Service and the Crisis of Cosmopolitanism,” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 39, no. 2 (2019): 316. 39. “Memo from Eastern Service Director, The Bengal Food Situation: Background Guidance,” quoted in Sinha, “BBC Eastern Service,” 313. For more on the famine and the ineffective response, see Arup Maharatna, The Demography of Famines: An Indian Historical Perspective (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). 40. The Sword of the Spirit was broadcast over the Home Service in “censored form” under the title The Church Militant on March 25, 1943. Andy Croft, Comrade Heart: A Life of Randall Swingler (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2003), 134. 41. Orwell introduces one of the contributors to Voice 1, Vida Hope, as “the wellknown character actress who has appeared at the Unity Theatre” (All, 460). 42. Colin Chambers, The Story of Unity Theatre (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1989), 236. 43. Chambers, The Story of Unity Theatre, 176, 157. 44. Quoted in Andrew Davies, “The War Years,” in Theatre and War 1933–1945: Performance in Extremis, ed. Michael Balfour (New York: Berghahn Books, 2001), 58. 45. Crisis, pamphlet, Unity Theatre Archives, Victoria & Albert Museum. 46. Verma, Theater of the Mind, 59. 47. Though the Unity Theatre Archive lacks any pictures or brochures for this particular performance, and though the remaining script seems to be an early version, we can infer a lot from other plays produced by the company. Pictures of Aristocrats (1937) show four screens with projections, many of the Unity Theatre productions from the time credit the Trix Electrical Company for providing sound equipment, and the brochure for Irwin Shaw’s Bury the Dead (1938) reads, “Records kindly supplied by Alfred Imhof, 122, New Oxford Street, W. C. 1.” Bury the Dead, pamphlet, Unity Theatre Archives, Victoria & Albert Museum. 48. Rebecca Walkowitz, Born Translated: The Contemporary Novel in an Age of World Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), 121. 49. The editorial team contextualizes the events throughout, with the assistant editor commenting after the club scene, “Behind all the bustle and excitement of New

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Delhi are drowned the agonies of the present millions existing on [a] level below subsistence” (12). 50. Each installment lasted for approximately twelve minutes. Anand’s scripts are housed in the BBC WAC. 51. Anand produced a thirty-minute feature entitled “Arthur Rimbaud” on October 1, 1945, but the script is not in the WAC. 52. Virginia Woolf, Anand’s erstwhile employer, especially appreciated Sickert. For an extended meditation on his art as writing, see Virginia Woolf, Walter Sickert: A Conversation (London: Hogarth Press, 1934). 53. As such, Anand’s focus on the figure of the prostitute may work at cross-purposes with what Jane Marcus identifies as a progressive view of English women in Coolie. For more, see Marcus, Hearts of Darkness. 54. Dylan Thomas, “Prologue to an Adventure,” Wales 1 (1937): 1–6, reprinted in Dylan Thomas: Early Prose Writings, ed. Walford Davies (London: Dent, 1971), 57; and Anand, “London,” 1. As one example of how the Eastern Service was integrated into the circuit of literary publication and promotion, Anand (had he not already been familiar with it) may have come across “Prologue to an Adventure” when he prepared to interview Keidrych Rhys, the editor of Wales, since Thomas’s prose experiment had prominent placement as the first work in the first issue of Rhys’s little magazine. “Prologue to an Adventure” was also published in Lawrence Durrell’s Delta (Paris) in 1938. Further attesting to the importance of the Eastern Service, Thomas’s letter to Durrell proposes including “the one you like in the paper of Tambimuttu,” referring to the journal Poetry London, edited by Anand’s fellow Eastern Service contributor, M. J. Tambimuttu; for more see James Gifford, “Durrell’s Delta and Dylan Thomas’ ‘Prologue to an Adventure,’ ” In-Between 13, no. 1 (March 2004): 19–23. 55. Thomas, “Prologue,” 57; Anand, “London,” 2. 56. Given this lower status, dialect became a central tool of white American modernists: as Michael North writes, Ezra Pound and Eliot tie “defiance of the standard language, presented here as an essentially black habit, to [their] own literary experimentation.” Michael North, The Dialect of Modernism: Race, Language & Twentieth-Century Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 78. 57. Mulk Raj Anand, Author to Critic: The Letters of Mulk Raj Anand, ed. Saros Cowasjee (Calcutta: Writers Workshop, 1973), 122; Margaret Berry, Mulk Raj Anand: The Man and the Novelist (Amsterdam: Oriental Press, 1971), 49. 58. Anand, Author to Critic, 116. 59. Venu Chitale hits the same point in one of her broadcasts: “There’s a whole caste of pot makers in India, though nowadays, there are factories turning out pots in mass production. I’m afraid they’re going to kill off the ancient craftsmanship of the potmakers.” Chitale, “Empire Exchange,” November 4, 1941, BBC, typescript, BBC WAC. 60. Mulk Raj Anand, The Big Heart (London: Hutchinson International Authors, 1945), 25, 50, 51; further references cited in text. 61. Dukes, after seeing a production of Die Maschinenstürmer in Berlin, visited Toller in prison to consult about the English translation. For more on English productions of Toller’s work, see Richard Dove, “The Place of Ernst Toller in English Socialist Theatre 1924–1939,” German Life and Letters 38, no. 2 (January 1985): 125–37.

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62. Augustine, the protagonist of Richard Hughes’s historical novel The Fox in the Attic, helps search for Toller after the “White forces” retake Munich in 1919; see Hughes, The Fox in the Attic (1961; New York: NYRB, 2000), 168. For more on Toller’s Requiem, see Dove, “The Place of Ernst Toller,” 132; for Pastor Hall, see Richard Dove, “The British Connection: Aspects of the Biography of Ernst Toller,” German Life and Letters 40, no.  4 (July  1987): 332; and for No More Peace, see Dove, “The British Connection,” 329. 63. Ernst Toller, The Machine-Wreckers, in Seven Plays, trans. Ashley Dukes (New York: Liveright, 1936), 43. 64. Other examples include the hawking of panaceas, depictions of children working the machines while the overseers justify child labor to visitors, and workers being locked out of the factory for showing up a few minutes late. 65. Toller, The Machine-Wreckers, 24. Other characters find a parallel in Toller as well. Ned Lud smashes the machines in Toller’s play and is transformed into the emotional Ralia in The Big Heart. Murli is the foreman and a cousin of Ananta’s, which is a slight modification of the relationship between Jimmy Cobbet and the foreman in The Machine-Wreckers, his estranged brother Henry. 66. Toller, The Machine-Wreckers, 25; Anand, The Big Heart, 193. 67. Toller, The Machine-Wreckers, 51–55. Cowasjee does not indicate why Anand changed the title to The Big Heart, but copyright issues may have been at play— Anand was forced to accept half pay from the BBC when he adapted the work of others. This happened at least twice, and on neither occasion had Anand initially indicated that the scripts were adaptations. While Cowasjee identifies The MachineWreckers as an important source, his analysis does not go beyond noting a few “points of similarity” like those between the prologue and the preface and “the death of the respective heroes.” Saros Cowasjee, So Many Freedoms: A Study of the Major Fiction of Mulk Raj Anand (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1977), 127. 68. N. A. Furness, “Toller and the Luddites: Fact and Symbol in ‘Die Maschinenstürmer,’ ” Modern Language Review 73 (1978): 848. 69. Quoted in Furness, “Toller and the Luddites,” 852. 70. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (Minneapolis: University Minnesota Press, 1986), 17. Shifting our attention from experiments in Germany to those in Prague, Deleuze and Guattari’s theses on “Minor Literature,” developed to discuss the works of Franz Kafka, have many potential parallels with Anand’s work and could perhaps usefully be extended to Anand’s entire generation of Anglophone Indian novelists. 71. Howard Spodek, Ahmedabad: Shock City of Twentieth-Century India (Bloomington: Indiana Univeristy Press, 2011), 5. 72. For Anand’s account of this encounter, see Anand, “The Story of My Experiment with a White Lie,” in Critical Essays on Indian Writing in English, ed. Naik et al. (Dharwar: Karnatak University Press, 1972), 6–20. 73. Spodek, Ahmedabad, 7. 74. In fact, in a later revision of Untouchable, Bahka’s idea of telling his father about the toilet becomes more imperative. See Anand, Untouchable, ed. Saros Cowasjee (London: Bodley Head, 1970). 75. The Big Heart is a limit case, however, based so closely on Toller that Anand didn’t mention Toller in connection with the novel, despite being open about other

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influences on the novel (such as Finnegans Wake and Rimbaud). Anand seemed less concerned about acknowledging influences on his other works; “Bakha,” which became Untouchable, is credited by Anand to the influence of Joyce’s Ulysses, Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, Yeats, Maud Gonne, J. M. Synge, and Gandhi. In a representative statement, Anand tells Cowasjee about Private Life of an Indian Prince in a letter on November  18, 1967: “As usual all the characters are taken from real life and transformed creatively from within in an almost Dostoevskian mood of pity. . . . You may detect the influence of Gide to some extent in this book, but it was much more Dostoevsky” (Anand, Author to Critic, 12). 76. Cleanth Brooks, “Irony as a Principle of Structure,” in The Critical Tradition, ed. David Richter (1951; Boston: Bedford, 2007), 799. 77. Ezra Pound, Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. T. S. Eliot (New York: New Directions, 1968), 70. 78. Franco Moretti, Modern Epic: The World-System from Goethe to García Márquez, trans. Quintin Hoare (1994; New York: Verso, 1996), 190. 79. Anand, “Attia Hosain: A Profile,” in Attia Hosain, Sunlight on a Broken Column (New Delhi: Arnold-Heinemann, 1979), viii.

4. INTIMATE AND KALEIDOSONIC STYLES 1. Fredric Jameson quoted in Julian Murphet, Multimedia Modernism: Literature and the Anglo-American Avant-garde (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 4–5. 2. Kate Lacey, Feminine Frequencies: Gender, German Radio, and the Public Sphere, 1923–1945 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), 132, 136, 146, 127. 3. L. V. Deane, “Payment to Mrs. Habibullah for Women’s Programme: Eastern Service Pakistan: For Third Quarter 1950,” memo, June 6, 1950, Attia Hosain RCONT, BBC WAC. 4. In contrast, Hosain’s second, unfinished novel takes place in late 1940s London and is written in a realist style. See newly published extracts in Attia Hosain, Distant Traveller: New & Selected Fiction (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2015), 16–71. 5. Chitale’s training was likely similar to Orwell’s; for the topics covered in his course, see George Orwell, All Propaganda Is Lies: 1941–1942, vol. 13 of The Complete Works of George Orwell, ed. Peter Davison (London: Secker & Warburg, 1998), 5–9. 6. Neil Verma, Theater of the Mind: Imagination, Aesthetics, and American Radio Drama (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 57, 68. 7. Neither writer is included in Salman Rushdie’s anthology of post-1947 Indian writing, despite its exclusive (and controversial) focus on Indian writing in English: Salman Rushdie and Elizabeth West, eds., Vintage Book of Indian Writing, 1947– 1997 (London: Vintage, 1997). In Transit receives two mentions in Iyengar’s Indian Writing in English and cursory treatment in Mukherjee’s The Twice Born Fiction but falls out of later accounts, perhaps because it is out of print. See K. R. Srinivasa Iyengar, Indian Writing in English (New Delhi: Sterling, 1984). Sunlight has fared better. This is at least partially because Hosain’s family has generated so many other writers, including her niece, Muneeza Shamsie, and her great-niece, Kamila

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Shamsie. Muneeza Shamsie wrote a comparative study of the other two (in which she questions Anand’s account of meeting Hosain); see “Sunlight and Salt: The Literary Landscapes of a Divided Family,” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 44, no. 1 (2009): 151–52. In addition, Attia Hosain’s children are both noted filmmakers, with her son Waris Hussein also working for the BBC and producing Forster’s A Passage to India and the first season of the famed television series Doctor Who; her daughter produces documentaries in India. The most detailed treatment of Hosain’s work remains R. K. Kaul and Jasbir Jain’s Attia Hosain: A Diptych Volume (Jaipur: Rawat, 2001). Sunlight also experienced a second life in the context of 1980s feminism when it was published by Heinemann in India in 1979 and by Virago Press in 1988, where it appeared next to the writings of Angela Carter and other predominantly white feminists. Virago, founded in 1973, focused on women writers; when Virago was acquired by Penguin in 1992, Sunlight gained a significantly more robust distribution network. Hosain credited this intervention for granting her work a second life; writing to Lynn Knight of the Virago Press to thank her, Hosain says: “Virago and all of you kind people I have met since I was resurrected by Virago—have made me feel Time is redeemable” (letter from Attia Hosain to Lynn Knight, June 1, 1993, Manuscripts Collection, British Library). Hosain’s more radical stance lent itself better to Virago than Chitale’s brand of social feminism. One of few critics to discuss Chitale recently is John Marx, Geopolitics and the Anglophone Novel, 1890–2011 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 159. See also new work by Sejal Sutaria, “Women’s Bodies, Women’s Voices: Venu Chitale’s Transnational Mediations on the BBC’s Home and Eastern Service,” Media, Culture, and Society (forthcoming); and Jennifer Nesbitt, “On Giving Up: Terrible Surprises and Good Ones,” paper presented at the Modernist Studies Association, Toronto, October 18, 2019. 8. Aamir Mufti’s chapter on the Indian novel in English is a recent example of this trend: “Global English and Its Others” in Forget English! Orientalisms and World Literatures (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2016), 146–202. Anuradha Dingwaney Needham, on the other hand, helpfully contrasts Hosain’s and Rushdie’s narratives of nationalism in “Multiple Forms of (National) Belonging: Attia Hosain’s Sunlight on a Broken Column,” Modern Fiction Studies 39, no. 1 (Spring 1993): 93–111. Sunlight is often read in the context of Purdah, in addition to Partition. For a cluster of such discussions, see the essays by Uma Parameswaran, Sarla Palkar, Amina Amin, and Jameela Begum in Margins of Erasure: Purdah in the Subcontinental Novel in English, ed. Jasbir Jain and Amina Amin (New Delhi: Sterling, 1995). 9. For more on Ali, see Priya Joshi, In Another Country: Colonialism, Culture, and the English Novel in India (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 205–27; for Sorabji, Hussain, and Ishvani, see Jessica Berman, Modernist Commitments: Ethics, Politics, and Transnational Modernism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 139–83. 10. Those that do focus on Partition, with Khuswant Singh’s Train to Pakistan (1956) taking pride of place. See, for example, Iyengar, Indian Writing in English, 324. 11. Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children (New York: Random House, 2006), 3. 12. Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 332. 13. Berman, Modernist Commitments, 143.

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14. Iyengar, Indian Writing in English, 286. 15. Susheila Nasta, Home Truths: Fictions of the South Asian Diaspora in Britain (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 40. 16. “Where immediacy suggests a unified visual space, contemporary hypermediacy offers a heterogeneous space, in which representation is conceived of not as a window on to the world, but rather as ‘windowed’ itself—with windows that open on to other representations or other media. The logic of hypermediacy multiplies the signs of mediation and in this way tries to reproduce the rich sensorium of human experience.” Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999), 34. 17. Lacey, Feminine Frequencies, 194. 18. Susan Ware, It’s One O’Clock and Here Is Mary Margaret McBride: A Radio Biography (New York: New York University Press, 2005), 13. 19. Michele Hilmes, Radio Voices: American Broadcasting, 1922–1952 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 131. 20. Venu Chitale, Programme Preview, September 1, 1942, BBC Eastern Service, typescript, BBC WAC, 6. 21. Venu Chitale, “The Hand That Rocks the Cradle: Then and Now,” January 1, 1942. 22. Lacey, Feminine Frequencies, 194. 23. Christine Ehrick, Radio and the Gendered Soundscape: Women and Broadcasting in Argentina and Uruguay, 1930–1950 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 2–3. 24. Sejal Sutaria, “Walking the Line: Venu Chitale,” History of the BBC, BBC. 25. As recorded in Chitale’s personnel file at the BBC WAC, these include “My Visit to Geneva” (in Marathi) b.cast 19 Dec. 1945; “A Trip to Cornwall” b.cast 18 July 1945; Afrikaans Mag. 26 April 1945; “Indian Competition” 8 Feb. 1942; 1 Jan. 1942 “The Hand that Rocks the Cradle”; 4 Nov. 1941 Empire Exchange w. Ferguson; 24.10.41 “The Man in the Street: Fashions are not Rationed”; Hand that Rocks the Cradle #1 9 Oct.  1941; 11 April  1941 “Talks to Women: Baby’s Care and Clothes”; 21 March 1941 “Mothers and Children in England”; 16 March 1941 “Feature Programme: The Londoners”; 26 Jan. 1941 “Not Quite Human”; 29 Jan. 1941 “Women of the West (5)” “A letter in English from Miss Chitale, to her friend Sitara, in Bombay. 10 minutes, telling about Women in wartime England” “It is mainly about bus conductresses, which you (ZAB) asked me to do” (Letter 18 Jan. 1941 Chitale to Bokhari); 11 Feb. 1941 “The Kitchen in Wartime: Appetizing Curries”; 21 Jan. 1941 “The Kitchen in Wartime: Some suggestions for doing without meat”; “Women of the West” (3) 11 Dec. 1940; Women of the West (4) recorded 1 Jan. 1941; “The Lightship” 29 Dec.  1940; Women of the West Rec. 11 Dec.  1940; “The Evacuees” 24 Nov. 1940; Women of the West (2) “about Women in National Service without being in Uniform” Rec. 20 Nov 1940; b.cast 6 December 1940; “the Hero from Poland” 3 Nov. 1940; “Women of the West (1)” bcast 14 Nov. 1940. 26. Letter from Venu Chitale to Z. A. Bokhari, October 10, 1940, BBC WAC. “Norman Corwin’s An American in England series brought us to London alongside the author to hear plucky maidens working flak guns” (Verma, Theater of the Mind, 64). 27. Chitale, “The Hand That Rocks the Cradle: Then and Now,” 3, 5. 28. Chitale and Sircar, “The Man in the Street,” May 8, 1942, BBC Eastern Service, typescript, BBC WAC. Sircar had experience in India, broadcast reviews of films

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released in India, and is the author of An Indian Boyhood (London: Hollis & Carter, 1948). 29. Chitale, Through Eastern Eyes: The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, October 9, 1941, BBC Eastern Service, typescript, BBC WAC. 30. Chitale, Programme Preview, December 22, 1942, BBC Eastern Service, typescript, BBC WAC. 31. All this is pieced together from program previews written by Chitale. Narayana Menon adapted The Little Clay Cart from the 1905 translation by Arthur William Ryder; see George Orwell, Keeping Our Little Corner Clean: 1942–1943, vol. 14 of The Complete Works of George Orwell, ed. Peter Davison (London: Secker & Warburg, 1998), 337. 32. Chitale, Through Eastern Eyes: The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, “Then and Now,” January 1, 1942, BBC Eastern Service, typescript, BBC WAC. 33. Chitale, Programme Preview, November 25, 1942?, BBC Eastern Service, typescript, BBC WAC. 34. Chandra Mohanty points to “the production of the ‘Third World woman’ as a singular, monolithic subject in some (Western) feminist texts.” Mohanty, Feminism Without Borders (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003), 17. 35. Attia Hosain and Rose-Mary Clifford, “Points of View,” BBC, February 14, 1952, typescript, BBC WAC, 1–2. Further references are cited as page numbers in the text. 36. This part of the exchange echoes an earlier one between Mrs. H. A. Ferguson and Chitale in which Chitale explains: “The only person who is excused from cooking is a girl who has a career, and goes to college, but even then she must do some.” Chitale, Empire Exchange, November 5, 1941, typescript, BBC WAC. 37. Julie Cyzewski, “Making Friends: The Geopolitics of the Interview on the BBC’s Eastern Services” Biography 41, no. 2 (2018): 334. 38. Hosain is less reserved in discussing racism in Sunlight: for example, Laila’s cousin Kemal shares his experience being shamed as a colored person in England (178), and Laila recalls taunts from her schoolmate: “Sylvia, humming ‘Rule Britannia’ each time she saw us after Sita’s Uncle had been arrested. Sylvia, scolding her sister Myra, ‘Can’t you keep away from wogs?’ ” (52). 39. Attia Hosain, Writing in a Foreign Tongue, May 8, 1956, Third Programme, typescript, BBC WAC, 6. 40. Emily Apter, “Untranslatables: A World System,” New Literary History 39, no. 3 (Summer 2008): 581. 41. Hosain, Writing in a Foreign Tongue. Hosain augmented the broadcast shortly before her death: “Deep Roots, New Language,” in Voices of the Crossing, ed. Ferdinand Dennis and Naseem Khan (London: Serpent’s Tail, 2000), 19–27. 42. In this sense, Hosain provides an early example of the “habitual, ritualized kinds  of self-conscious positioning” of postcolonial authors. Sarah Brouillette, Postcolonial Writers in the Global Literary Marketplace (New York: Palgrave, 2007), 174. 43. Homi Bhabha, “Introduction: Narrating the Nation,” in Nation and Narration (New York: Routledge, 1990), 1. 44. Meenakshi Mukherjee, The Twice Born Fiction: Themes and Techniques of the Indian Novel in English (New Delhi: Heinemann, 1971), 209.

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45. Georg Lukács, The Historical Novel, trans. Hannah and Stanley Mitchell (1937; Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983), 24. Further references are cited in the text. 46. Venu Chitale, “Empire Exchange: Discussion Between Mrs. H. A. Ferguson of Australia and Venu Chitale of India,” November  4, 1941, Empire Service, BBC WAC, 6. 47. Diana Wallace, The Woman’s Historical Novel: British Women Writers, 1900–2000 (New York: Palgrave, 2005), 3, 25. 48. Greg Forter argues that the postcolonial historical novel is transnational in radical ways, and we can see in both of these works that whatever happens on the ground in India is intimately tied to events, ideas, and people elsewhere. Forter, “Atlantic and Other Worlds: Critique and Utopia in Postcolonial Historical Fiction,” PMLA 131, no. 5 (October 2016): 1328–43. In the case of these works, the transnational frame is replicated in their reception, with the BBC contributing to the author-function of both of these writers. 49. Joshi, In Another Country, 204. 50. Lukács, The Historical Novel, 23. 51. In broad terms, In Transit is the tale of a wada, or traditional mansion, in Poona (now Pune), India. The Saraf family it depicts are jewelers and Chitpavan Brahmins. The novel traces the dissolution of the Saraf house between 1915 and 1934. Though the novel may be autobiographical on some level (Chitale was also a Brahmin from Maharashtra and came to England in the 1930s from Poona), Chitale joins the tradition of the bildungsroman with the frame of the historical novel, specifically a three-generation family saga. The novel opens with the grandfather in control of the wada, Abba. His is an enlightened rule, however. The novel traces the grandfather’s transition from a wealthy patriarch to an ascetic, with a renunciation of worldly goods in order to follow Gandhi and serve the Congress cause. So little has been written on Chitale that I have struggled to piece together her biography. Chitale (later Leelabhai Ganesh Khare) was born in 1912 in Maharashtra state, growing up in a Brahmin family house in Pune. Educated first at Wilson College, Bombay, by the late 1930s she was in England, pursuing a degree at University College, London. Though not yet a full-time BBC employee, she broadcast frequently while a student, including at least seven broadcasts in 1940 and eleven in 1941. Chitale joined the full-time staff as a “junior program assistant” in December 1941 at £363 per year (Orwell, All Propaganda Is Lies, 58). Promoted soon after, she is listed as an “Assistant (Marathi)” by August 21, 1943 (Orwell, All Propaganda Is Lies, 18). Chitale was assigned to Orwell’s office but managed to broadcast on both the Eastern Service and the Home Service. For example, she broadcast over the Home Service on curries and other vegetarian dishes during wartime shortages of meat. After the war she stayed on in London, working for the India League, on whose behalf she attended conferences in Geneva and Paris. Her trip to Geneva was the subject of a broadcast made shortly before her return to India. According to the back flap of In Transit, “in 1946 she attended the All-India Women’s Conference in Hyderabad (Sind) where the late Sarojini Naidu introduced her as the most sweet-voiced ‘bulbul’ of our times.” By October 1950, when In Transit was to be published, she was resettled in India and married to Prof. T. G. Khare, taking the name Leelabhai Khare. One of few sources of information on Chitale is the

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Making Britain website by the Open University (https://www.open.ac.uk /researchprojects/makingbritain/content/venu-chitale), which states that she wrote a second novel, Incognito, but I have not been able to locate any record of this elsewhere. 52. Though this argument was a long-standing one, the conflict over it was raised to a far higher pitch by the publication of Katherine Mayo’s “sensationalist exposé,” Mother India (1927). As Mrinalini Sinha points out, however, women’s groups in India responded to the book as “paradigmatic citizen-subjects of a nation-statein-the-making,” ones who acted above community interests, offering “a precarious universality constituted through a shared political agenda.” Sinha, Specters of Mother India: The Global Restructuing of an Empire (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2006), 2, 10. 53. Barbara Southard, “Colonial Politics and Women’s Rights: Woman Suffrage Campaigns in Bengal, British India in the 1920s,” Modern Asian Studies 27, no.  2 (May 1993): 408. 54. The novel’s “montage of fragments in provisional or indeterminate relations” also calls to mind the periodical, but no more so than the feature, the radio play, or the flow of broadcast programming in general. David Bennett, “Periodical Fragments and Organic Culture: Modernism, the Avant-Garde, and the Little Magazine,” Contemporary Literature 30, no. 4 (Winter 1989): 480. 55. Alex Goody, “BBC Features, Radio Voices and the Propaganda of War 1939–1941,” Media History 24, no. 2 (2018): 196. Chitale refers to Anniversaries of the Month as features in a letter to Desmond Hawkins quoted in Orwell, Keeping Our Little Corner Clean, 331. 56. Venu Chitale, Programme Preview, August 4, 1942, BBC Eastern Service, typescript, WAC, 1. 57. Lance Sieveking, The Stuff of Radio (London: Cassel, 1934), 26. 58. Laurence Gilliam, BBC Features (London: Evans Brothers, 1950), 10. 59. Quoted in Venu Chitale, Through Eastern Eyes: Anniversaries of the Month, August 11, 1942, BBC Eastern Service, typescript, BBC WAC, 6. 60. Eric Williams launched a similar critique simultaneously with James, defending his dissertation, “The Economic Aspects of the Abolition of the Slave Trade,” in 1938, though the book version, Capitalism and Slavery, was not published until 1944. 61. Verma, Theater of the Mind, 68. 62. Verma, Theater of the Mind, 50. 63. Chitale, Through Eastern Eyes: Anniversaries of the Month, 2. 64. Verma, Theater of the Mind, 67. 65. Verma, Theater of the Mind, 70. 66. Ministry of Information Propaganda file, quoted in E. M. Forster, The BBC Talks of E. M. Forster: A Selected Edition, ed. Mary Lago, Linda K. Hughes, and Elizabeth Walls (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2008), 21. 67. Verma, Theater of the Mind, 59. 68. Chitale, Through Eastern Eyes: Anniversaries of the Month, 3. 69. The program as a whole ends with the song “Marching Through Georgia” (1865) by Henry Clay Work (which, ironically, was sung by the British in India). Edwin Tribble, “Marching Through Georgia,” Georgia Review 21, no. 4 (1967): 423.

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70. Venu Chitale, In Transit (Bombay: Hind Kitabs, 1950), 1. Further page references cited in text. 71. To give just one more example of many, late in the novel the narrator reviews the events of late 1931: “The Round Table Conference which was attended by Gandhiji on behalf of the Congress was coming to an end.” This then switches to Mohana’s wedding preparations: “Mohana smiled. ‘Green bangles. Bride’s bangles,’ she repeated to herself in the darkness” (394–95). 72. Ankhi Mukherjee, “Fissured Skin, Inner Ear Radio, and a Telepathic Nose: The Senses as Media in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children” Paragraph 29, no. 3 (November 2006): 55–76. 73. Suvir Kaul, “Women, Reform, and Nationalism in Three Novels of Muslim Life,” in A History of the Indian Novel in English (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 145. 74. Hosain, Distant Traveller, xix. 75. By the early 1940s the couple had moved to Bombay, where Hosain began to publish short stories, such as “The Parrot in a Cage.” Anand included the story in his collection Indian Short Stories. The only female writer in the volume, Hosain appears under her married name. Attia Habibullah, “The Parrot in a Cage,” in Indian Short Stories, ed. Mulk Raj Anand and Iqbal Singh (London: New India, 1946), 133–37. For a fuller treatment of Hosain’s biography, see Shama Habibullah’s foreword in Hosain, Distant Traveller, ix–xxix. 76. Hosain’s career at the BBC was primarily as a reader. Her other talks include one on the cinemas of Africa and Asia on the Home Service, May 6, 1955; “A Conversation on Homesickness,” Home, April 13, 1956; and “Comparative Religion,” Network 3, January 7, 1965. These scripts do not appear to be extant, but contracts for the appearances are held at the BBC WAC. 77. As a scholar trained in Irish literature, I call this genre the Big House novel, but—as Jed Esty points out—it can be usefully thought under the wider rubric of “the plantation gothic, a characteristic genre of settler-colonialism, found in the plantocratic contact zones from Ireland to the slave economies of the New World, in the works of Faulkner and Rhys, and in the Caribbean zombie films of 1940s Hollywood.” Esty, Unseasonable Youth: Modernism, Colonialism, and the Fiction of Development (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 179–80. 78. In the first Indian edition of Sunlight (1979), Anand likens the novel to both Elizabeth Bowen’s Bowen’s Court and E. M. Forster’s Howards End. Mulk Raj Anand, “Attia Hosain: A Profile,” in Attia Hosain, Sunlight on a Broken Column (New Delhi: Arnold-Heinemann, 1979), xii, xiv. Like Hosain, Bowen broadcast for the BBC after World War II, speaking on literature and the difficulties of working as a woman writer. For Bowen’s broadcasts, see Bowen, Listening In: Broadcasts,  Speeches, and Interviews by Elizabeth Bowen, ed. Allan Hepburn (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010); and Emily Bloom, The Wireless Past: Anglo-Irish Writers and the BBC, 1931–1968 (New York: Oxford, 2016), 94–127. 79. Mukherjee, The Twice Born Fiction, 53. 80. Antoinette Burton, Dwelling in the Archive: Women Writing House, Home, and History in Late Colonial India (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 108. 81. Esty, Unseasonable Youth, 164–65.

239 EPILOGUE

82. Laila’s cousin anticipates her political position later in the novel by criticizing Asad’s faith in nationalism: “The people rotted under the rulers of our own race, as they do under the English and as they will do if we rule ourselves again” (102).

EPILOGUE 1. Asa Briggs, The War of Words (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 651. 2. Between 1950 and 1953 the BBC broadcast sixteen items related to Joyce—twelve on the Third, with only one, Patricia Hutchins’s “Books and People,” directed to Asia. For a list of these, see Patrick Callan, “Eclectrically Filtered for Allirish Earths and Ohmes: Broadcasting the Work of James Joyce on BBC Radio, 1931–1956,” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 39, no. 4 (2019): 832–63. Callan’s listing must be approached with caution, however, as L. A. G. Strong’s Eastern Service broadcast is incorrectly listed as appearing on the Third. 3. For instance, on January 11, 1949, Forster broadcast in the series I Speak for Myself over the Far Eastern Service, which was then replayed on the Third in March of that year. B. J. Kirkpatrick, “E. M. Forster’s Broadcast Talks,” Twentieth Century Literature 31, no. 3 (Summer–Autumn 1985): 340. 4. Asa Briggs, The BBC: The First Fifty Years (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 314. 5. Julian Hale, Radio Power: Propaganda and International Broadcasting (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1975), 53–54. 6. Gerard Mansell, Let Truth Be Told: 50 Years of BBC External Broadcasting (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1982), 246. 7. Mansell, Let Truth Be Told, 235. 8. Mansell, Let Truth Be Told, 245. 9. Mansell, Let Truth Be Told, 245. 10. Sharika Thiranagama, “Partitioning the BBC: From Colonial to Postcolonial Broadcaster,” South Asian Diaspora 2, no. 1 (2010): 39–55. 11. See George Orwell, Keeping Our Little Corner Clean: 1942–1943, vol. 14 of The Complete Works of George Orwell, ed. Peter Davison (London: Secker & Warburg, 1998), 154– 63, for the script. The genre of the imaginary conversation predates radio, but Orwell’s remediation of the genre is particularly significant given that Heppenstall not only contributed to the Eastern Service but did so at Orwell’s invitation, in January 1943 for a talk on the American short story (Orwell, Keeping Our Little Corner Clean, 316–17). By 1945 Heppenstall was a BBC employee as well, working as a producer in the Features Department. 12. After July 1945, Features and Drama were independent of each other as well. Kate Whitehead, The Third Programme: A Literary History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 112. 13. Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children (New York: Random House, 2006). The BBC continued to be a major player in the Indian media ecology, particularly in moments of crisis. Salman Rushdie identifies one during the Indo-Pakistani War of 1965 (389). For an instance during the later Emergency, see Pragya Dhital, “Media Satyagraha in the Broadcast Age: Underground Literature and Populist Politics

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During the Indian Internal Emergency of 1975–1977,” Interventions 21, no. 7 (2019): 942–58. 14. Ankhi Mukherjee, “Fissured Skin, Inner-Ear Radio, and a Telepathic Nose: The Senses as Media in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children,” Paragraph 29, no. 3 (November 2006): 61. 15. Sam Selvon, The Lonely Londoners (London: Penguin, 2006), vi. 16. V. S. Naipaul, “Introduction,” in Sam Selvon, “Come Back to Grenada,” Caribbean Voices, BBC Colonial Service, June 5, 1955, typescript, BBC WAC, 1. In a comment that is crossed out in the script, Naipaul points out that the stories were written in “a modified form of the Trinidad dialect, which preserved all the richness and quaint attractiveness of that dialect, but made it more intelligible to nonTrinidadians” (1). 17. Selvon, “Come Back to Grenada,” 1. Further references cited in the text. 18. Selvon contributed to a pamphlet published by the Caribbean Service, Going to Britain?, specifically the sections “Rules of the House,” “Landlord and Landlady,” “The People Around You,” and “Parties.” Going to Britain? (London: British Broadcasting Corporation, 1959), https://www.bl.uk /collection-items/ bbc-pamphlet -going-to-britain. Interestingly, Selvon sounds a lot like Scottie/Harris, especially in the “Parties and Dances” section, where he warns readers: “If there is a rule which says no jiving, don’t start to make any fancy West Indian steps. You may feel you are quite hep, but it will be in bad taste” (69). 19. Jane Grant, “Introduction,” in Sam Selvon, Ways of Sunlight (London: Hodder Education, 1987), ix. 20. Selvon, The Lonely Londoners, 101–10. The passage also recalls Virginia Woolf ’s Mrs. Dalloway, with its celebration of a summer day in London, as well as T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land in its invocation of “cold blasts.” 21. Sam Selvon, Eldorado West One, ed. Susheila Nasta (Leeds: Peepal Tree Press, 2008), 53. 22. Selvon, Eldorado West One, 47. 23. Edgar Mittelholzer, Caribbean Voices, November 11, 1956, BBC Caribbean Service, typescript, BBC WAC, 1. 24. Rhonda Cobham, “The Caribbean Voices Programme and the Development of West Indian Short Fiction,” in The Story Must Be Told: Short Narrative Prose in the New English Literatures, ed. Peter Stummer (Bayreuth: Konigshanson & Newmann, 1986), 151. 25. Glyne Griffith, The BBC and the Development of Anglophone Caribbean Literature, 1943–1958 (New York: Palgrave, 2016), 60. 26. “Paddy Dignam’s Funeral,” BBC Third Programme, June 16, 1954. 27. Sam Selvon, “A West Indian Symposium,” Caribbean Voices, BBC Colonial Service, July 9, 1950, typescript, BBC WAC, 3.

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INDEX

Abbey Theatre (Dublin), 53 Abinger Harvest (Forster), 94, 219n46 Account of the Pelew Islands, An (Keate), 105 Ackerley, J. R., 92, 221n58 Across the Black Waters (Anand), 124–25, 167 Adl, Mohammed el, 104 Adorno, Theodor, 110 advertising, 59 Africa, 188 Ahmedabad, 147–48 Ali, Ahmed: Eastern Service and, 14; Forster and, 83, 86, 97, 100; Indian Anglophone literature and, 155; Indian Writing and, 121–22; Progressive Writers Association and, 100 All India Radio (AIR): BBC and, 6; censorship and, 191; Emergency and, 191; Fielden and, 11; Forster and, 83, 84–85, 92–93, 225n98; Midnight’s Children and, 190–92; Ministry of Information and, 201n37; in Sunlight on a Broken Column, 165 All India Women’s Congress, 161

Allen, Charles, 228n21 Allen & Unwin (publisher), 227n15 All-India Centre, 92 All-India Progressive Writers Association, 142 alternative modernities, 16, 88–90 Alton Locke (Kingsley), 147 Amery, Leo, 127 Amyot, Etienne, 227n11 Anam, Nasia, 18 Anand, Mulk Raj: censorship and, 119; Eastern Service and, 1–4, 2, 15, 114–16, 116, 117–18, 126–27, 135–36, 187; Eastern Service’s Voice and, 3–4, 115, 117, 119, 122–26, 127–29, 148; Empson and, 228–29n32; Forster and, 83, 86–87, 97, 100, 223n71; Hosain and, 232–33n7, 238n75, 238n78; impact of radio on literary form and, 141–42; as “impatient modernist,” 116, 117, 138–39, 141–42; Indian Anglophone literature and, 155, 193; Indian Writing and, 121–22; intertextuality and, 118–19, 136–42, 148; Joyce and, 99; Listener and, 91; “London as I See It” and, 118–19, 136–41, 148–49, 150;

256 INDEX

Anand, Mulk Raj (continued) Orwell and, 228–29n32; on A Passage to India, 103; photographs of, 2, 115, 116; Progressive Writers Association and, 100; on proletariat, 166; remediation of novel and radio and, 4–5, 151. See also Big Heart, The (Anand); Unity Theatre and, 129–32, 227n15 Anand, Mulk Raj—works: Across the Black Waters, 124–25, 167; The Barber’s Trade Union and Other Stories, 227n15; Conversations in Bloomsbury, 86–87, 99, 137, 227n15; Coolie, 115, 133; Famine, 130; Indian Short Stories, 238n75; Letters on India, 227n15; Persian Painting, 91; Private Life of an Indian Prince, 232n75; The Sword and the Sickle, 87, 124–25, 127, 227n15; The Village, 91, 124–25. See also Big Heart, The (Anand); Untouchable (Anand) Anderson, Benedict, 48 Anna Livia Plurabelle (Joyce), 213n59 Annals of the Four Masters, The (Irish chronicle), 210n29 Another Time (Auden), 145–46 Appadurai, Arjun, 16 Apter, Emily, 163–64 Arabic Service, 11, 33, 188, 225n101 archives and archival theory, 29–35, 96–97 Aristocrats (play), 229n47 Arrah-na-Poghue (Boucicault), 210n29 Aspects of the Novel (Forster), 219n46 Atkins, John, 127 Auden, W. H., 122–24, 145–46 “Auld Lang Syne” (song), 210n29 Austen, Jane, 88 avant-textes (preprint materials), 9 Avery, Todd, 23, 25, 46, 78 Azad, Abdul Kalam, 127 Azad Hind Radio, 80, 136, 145, 165 Babes in the Wood (Christmas pantomime), 130 Bachelor of Arts, The (Narayan), 91

Banerji, Tarashankar, 100, 218n27 Barber’s Trade Union and Other Stories, The (Anand), 227n15 Barnes, George, 90–91 Barthes, Roland, 96–97 Baudelaire, Charles, 137, 139 BBC. See British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) BBC Written Archives Centre (WAC), 30–32 Beach, Sylvia, 45, 64–66, 72 Beckett, Samuel, 46–47, 63–64, 71 Bédier, Joseph, 51, 53 Beer, Max, 147 Beggar My Neighbor (Fielden), 221n58 Behn, Aphra, 174 Behrendt, Rachel, 46 Bell, Clive, 227n15 Bengal Famine, 100, 119, 129, 133–35 Bengali (language), 11 Benjamin, Walter, 111 Bennett, David, 9, 237n54 Bennett, Louise, 19 Berman, Jessica, 155, 200n13 Berry, Margaret, 141 Bhabha, Homi, 165 Bh‫ک‬sa, 160 Bhavabhuti, 160 bibliographic codes, 9, 10 bibliography, 9 Big Heart, The (Anand): composition of, 227n15; Expressionism and, 144–49; intertextuality and, 141–42; Die Maschinenstürmer and, 118–19, 145–49; radio in, 1–3, 6, 136; reception of, 149–50; social realism and, 142–45; temporalities and, 115; Voice and, 119 bildungsroman: Sunlight on a Broken Column and, 153, 165, 178, 182–85; In Transit and, 153, 165, 236n51 Billy Budd (Melville), 221n58 Black Jacobins, The (James), 91, 173 Blake, William, 71 Bloom, Emily, 5, 21, 204n82 Bloomfield, Paul, 205n97 Bloomsbury Group, 23, 24–25, 78, 83

257 INDEX

Bokhari, Ahmed S., 11, 86 Bokhari, Zulfiqar Ali: career of, 187–88; Cripps Mission and, 127; Eastern Service and, 12–13, 14, 82, 114, 127, 193; Fielden and, 225n98; photograph of, 82 Bolter, Jay, 7, 78–79, 234n16 Book of Verse (BBC program), 34, 70 book reviews, 111–12. See also Some Books (BBC program) Bose, Kumudini, 171 Bose, Subhas, 14 Boucicault, Dion, 210n29 Bowen, Elizabeth, 5, 182–83, 184 Bowen’s Court (Bowen), 182–83 Bradbury, Malcolm, 216n13 Brander, Laurence, 13, 202n45 Branson, Clive, 111 Brathwaite, Edward Kamau, 19, 20 Brecht, Bertolt, 7, 51, 118, 130–31 Breton, André, 64 Briggs, Asa, 13, 31, 32–34, 81 Brighter Sun, A (Selvon), 194 Brion, Marcel, 63 British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC): All India Radio and, 6; censorship and, 90–91; Colonial Office and, 101–4; decline of external services in postwar years and, 188–89; in Finnegans Wake, 57, 58–59, 62; foreign-language offerings of, 11–12. See also specific languages; historiography and archives of, 29–35; Joyce and, 45–48; promotion of Finnegans Wake and, 40–41; Received Pronunciation and, 79; 2RN (Irish national radio) and, 59; Yeats and, 209n20. See also Eastern Service; Home Service; specific programs and services British Soldier in India (Branson), 111 Britten, Benjamin, 96 Brivic, Shelly, 215n89 Brooker, Joseph, 63 Brooker, Peter, 10 Brooks, Cleanth, 149 Brouillette, Sarah, 85, 235n42

“Brown of Ossawatomie” (Whittier), 174 Buckingham, Bob, 96 Budgen, Frank, 64 Bulson, Eric, 10, 119–20 Burton, Antoinette, 183 Bury the Dead (Shaw), 229n47 Busmen (play), 131 Byron, George Gordon, 125, 145, 147 Cahoon, Herbert, 213n59 “Calypsonian” (Selvon), 195 Campbell, Joseph, 40, 54–55 Canclini, Néstor García, 85 ɇapek, Karel, 103 carbon-granule microphones, 26–27 Cardiff, David, 29, 205n97, 206n111 Caribbean Service, 18–20, 193 Caribbean Voices (BBC program): contents of, 193; Eastern Service and, 35; global Anglophone literature and, 18–19; Marson and, 204n80; Selvon and, 19, 194–96, 197–98; vernacular language and, 19–20; Voice and, 119 Carlow, Lord, 47 Carpenter, Edward, 96, 106 Carter, Angela, 233n7 Cathleen Listens-In (O’Casey), 53 censorship: Anand and, 119; BBC and, 90–91; BBC archives and, 31–32; Bengal Famine and, 100, 119, 129, 134–35; Eastern Service and, 12–13, 84, 90–91, 100, 119, 129, 134–35; in India, 97, 114, 221n58; India and, 191; in Ireland, 215n92; Some Books and, 84, 90–91, 93–97; Ulysses and, 45–46, 65–66; Unity Theatre and, 131 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 16 Chakravarty, Paula, 226n2 Chatterji, Saratchandra, 89–90, 218n27 Chaudhuri, Pramatha, 218n27 Ch’ien, Hsiao, 91, 136 China, 188, 228n32 Chitale, Venu (later Leelabhai Ganesh Khare): Eastern Service and, 115, 116, 152, 187; Eastern Service’s Voice and, 159–60; Eastern Service’s women’s programs and, 151–52, 157–61, 166;

258 INDEX

Chitale, Venu (continued) feature genre and, 21, 172–78; Forster and, 89; Incognito and, 237n51; intimate and kaleidosonic styles and, 5, 132, 154, 173–78; life of, 236–37n51; photograph of, 115, 116; on pot makers, 230n59; remediation of novel and radio and, 4–5, 154, 156–57, 185–86, 190, 193; social feminism and, 160–63. See also In Transit (Chitale) “Christopher” (McFarlane), 197 Christopher Columbus (BBC radio play), 21 Churchill, Suzanne, 9 Clandillon, Séamus, 44 Clark, J. B., 201–2n37 Clifford, Rose-Mary, 161–63, 185 Cohen, Debra Rae, 5–6, 91–92, 112 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 220n49 Coleridge-Taylor, Samuel, 173 Colonial Office, 84, 101–4, 112, 114 “Come Back to Grenada” (Selvon), 194–96 Commonwealth of Letters (Kalliney), 19 Connolly, Cyril, 109–10, 214n81 Connor, James, 55 Contact (literary magazine), 49 Conversations in Bloomsbury (Anand), 86–87, 99, 137, 227n15 Coolie (Anand), 115, 133 Corwin, Norman, 175 Coupland, Reginald, 102–3 Cowasjee, Saros, 147, 231n67, 232n75 Coyle, Michael, 22, 67, 112, 205n91 Cripps, Stafford, 126–27, 130 Crisis (play), 131–32 Criterion (literary magazine), 49, 67, 227n15, 228n21 Cuddy-Keane, Melba, 122 cultural studies, 29–30, 34 Culture and Imperialism (Said), 106 Culture Industry thesis, 110, 112 Cunard, Nancy, 227n15 Cyzewski, Julie, 162 “Dark Girl’s Rhyme, The” (Parker), 173–74 Darling, Malcolm, 12, 193

Day Book, 148 Day in My Life, A (BBC series), 117–18 Day Lewis, C., 5–6 Deleuze, Gilles, 147 Deliverance, The (Chatterji), 89, 218n27 Delta (literary magazine), 230n54 Derrida, Jacques, 30–31 Desani, G. V., 14, 99, 155 Development of William Butler Yeats, The (Menon), 87, 92, 218n27, 222n66 Dial (literary magazine), 228n21 dialect. See vernacular language Dickinson, Goldsworthy Lowes, 96, 219–20n46&7, 220n51 diffusionist model of culture, 16, 81, 115–16 Dinshaw, Carolyn, 96–97 Dinsman, Melissa, 117 distance learning, 92 documentary realism, 132 Dover, Cedric, 91, 121–22 Drama Department, 189 Dubliners (Joyce), 70 Dukes, Ashley, 145 Durrell, Lawrence, 230n54 E. M. Forster (Lago), 112–13 Eastern Service: Anand and, 114–16, 116, 117–18, 126–27, 135–36. See also Voice (BBC program); Briggs on, 33; Caribbean Service and Caribbean Voices and, 19, 35, 193; censorship and, 12–13, 84, 90–91, 100, 119, 129, 134–35; Ch’ien and, 91, 136; Chitale and, 115, 116, 152, 187; colonial temporality and, 16–17; Cripps Mission and, 126–27; distance learning and, 92; Eliot and, 14, 115, 116; Forster and, 14, 15, 82, 193. See also Some Books (BBC program); gender roles at, 152–54; Hosain and, 153, 182, 187, 189; internationalism and, 80–83; limits of, 129; Listener and, 91; Marson and, 115, 116, 204n80; networks of distribution and, 10; origins of, 11–13, 34–35; Orwell and, 13, 14, 15, 17–18, 81–83, 114, 115, 116, 187, 193. See also Voice (BBC program);

259 INDEX

Partition and, 189; postcolonial criticism and, 83–84; postwar period and, 187–89; propaganda and, 1, 15–17, 80–83, 135–36; radio lectures on Joyce and, 39, 40–41, 63, 64, 66–74; remediation of novel and radio and, 4–5, 17–18, 35. See also Voice (BBC program); scholarship on, 81–82; in Sunlight on a Broken Column, 165; target audience and listeners of, 14, 17–18, 114, 121; Third Programme and, 33–34, 90, 91, 117, 187, 189–90; women’s programs and, 151–52, 157–63 Egypt, 104–5 Ehrick, Christine, 156–57, 158 Eldorado West One (Selvon), 196 Eliot, T. S.: Anand and, 139, 140–41, 227n15; Chitale and, 159–60; Criterion and, 67, 227n15, 228n21; Eastern Service and, 14, 115, 116; Forster on, 218n27; Listener and, 91; photograph of, 115, 116; radio lecture on Joyce by, 40–41, 63, 66–69, 72; reception in India of, 98; talk genre and, 22; Third Programme and, 189; Ulysses and, 45; vernacular language and, 230n56 Eliot, T. S.—works: “The Hollow Men,” 183; “Little Gidding,” 218n27; Murder in the Cathedral, 159–60; “Ulysses, Order, and Myth,” 67–68; The Waste Land, 118, 139, 140–41, 149, 228n21 Ellmann, Richard, 46 Emergency (1975–1977), 191 Emigrants, The (Lamming), 136–37 Empire Service, 11–12, 14, 15, 33, 34, 81, 112 Empson, William, 115, 116, 124, 127–29 Enemies of Promise (Connolly), 109–10 Engels, Friedrich, 147 epitext, 9, 93 Epoch’s End (Banerji), 218n27 Essential James Joyce, The (Levin), 213n59 Esty, Jed, 16–17, 183–84, 238n77 Evening Herald (newspaper), 44 Exagmination, An (Beckett et al.), 64

Faber and Faber (publisher), 45, 57, 213n59, 227n15 Famine (Anand), 130 Far Eastern Service, 228n32, 239n3 Farewell My Friend (Tagore), 218n27 Fargue, Léon-Paul, 64 feature genre, 21–22, 172–78 Features Department, 21–22, 172, 173, 189 feminism, 153–54, 160–63, 166–67, 171, 233n7 Ferguson, H. A., 235n36 Fielden, Lionel, 11–12, 33, 96, 225n98 Fifield, Peter, 216n7 Finnegans Wake (Joyce): “Anna Livia Plurabelle” episode in, 70, 71–72, 73, 213n59; compared to Midnight’s Children, 191; composition of, 48–56, 57–59, 72–73. See also Work in Progress (Joyce); French broadcasts on, 45, 46; Home Service and, 39; “Mamalujo” episode in, 48–56, 60; polarized reception of, 62–64, 65–66; radio afterlife of, 62–63, 66–74, 98–99; radio as inspiration for polylogue style of, 5, 39, 41–43, 48–56, 58, 74–76, 193; radio as nexus for critique of imperialism and postcolonial state, 42–43, 56–62; radio for promotion of, 39, 40–41, 45, 46–47, 63, 64–65, 66–74; Spender’s obituary and, 66; “Tristan and Iseult” episode in, 49 Fisher, H. A. L., 92 Flaubert, Gustave, 70 Fleurs du mal, Les (Baudelaire), 139 Forces Program (BBC program), 121 Ford, Ford Maddox, 49. See also transatlantic review (literary magazine) Foreign Office, 201n37 Forster, E. M.: Ackerley and, 92; All India Radio and, 83, 84–85, 92–93, 225n98; Anand and, 227n15; anti-imperial writings by, 84, 103–8; censorship and, 84, 93–97; as “closet modernist,” 77, 112–13; Eastern Service and, 14, 15, 82, 193. See also Some Books (BBC

260 INDEX

Forster, E. M. (continued) program); Far Eastern Service and, 239n3; Fielden and, 11; Indian writers and, 97–98, 99–100; Indian Writing and, 100, 121–22; internationalism and, 80–83; investment in personal relationships and friendship of, 83, 92, 101, 105–8; Listener and, 91, 92, 219n41; modernism on the radio and, 77–81, 92–93, 95, 101. See also Some Books (BBC program); photograph of, 82; queer writing and, 84, 93–97; radio as source of financial support for, 110; radio lecture on Joyce by, 40–41, 63, 69, 91, 98–99; remediation of novel and radio and, 4–5, 7, 151, 193–94. See also Some Books (BBC program); Smith and, 17; talk genre and, 23, 78–80, 206n107; Third Programme and, 33, 187, 189; voice and accent of, 79 Forster, E. M.—works: Abinger Harvest, 94, 219n46; Aspects of the Novel, 219n46; The Government of Egypt, 104–5; The Hill of Devi, 219n43; Howards End, 84, 107, 238n78; A Letter to Madan Blanchard, 105; Maurice, 94, 96–97; Nordic Twilight, 92; “Story by Five Authors,” 219n45; Two Cheers for Democracy, 83, 92, 219n41. See also Passage to India, A (Forster) Forter, Greg, 236n48 Fortnightly Review (magazine), 227n15 Foucault, Michel, 30–31 Fox in the Attic, The (Hughes), 231n62 Frankfurt School, 110, 112 French, Percy, 60 French Revolution, 168 Freud, Sigmund, 145–46 friendship: Anand on, 83; Forster and, 83, 92, 101, 105–8, 113; Hosain and, 162 Furness, N. A., 147 Gandhi, Mahatma: Anand and, 147–48, 232n75; Fielden and, 11–12; luddism and, 136, 143; nationalist movement

and, 168; Orwell on, 127; in Sunlight on a Broken Column, 155, 169; in In Transit, 155, 169, 176–77 Gaonkar, Dilip, 16 Gaskell, Philip, 10 gender roles: Eastern Service and, 152–54; in India, 166–67, 170–71; Mother India and, 166–67; women’s programs and, 157–63 General Overseas Service, 14, 188 Genette, Gérard, 9, 93 George Allen and Unwin (publisher), 92 George V, King of the United Kingdom, 57 German Expressionism, 132, 144–49 Geschichte des Sozialismus in England, Die (Beer), 147 Gide, André, 65 Gielgud, Val, 21 Gilbert, Stuart, 64 Gillet, Louis, 46 Gilliam, Laurence, 21, 173 Gilroy, Paul, 29–30, 34 Gitelman, Lisa, 22, 54, 75, 199n8 global Anglophone literature, 18–19. See also Caribbean Voices (BBC program); Indian Anglophone literature Going to Britain? (pamphlet), 240n18 Gonne, Maud, 232n75 Goshal, Kumar, 111 Government of Egypt, The (Forster), 104–5 Griffith, Glyne, 19–20, 197 Grusin, Richard, 7, 78–79, 234n16 Guattari, Felix, 147 Gujarati (language), 11 Gulliver’s Travels (Swift), 137 Guru, Kumara, 87 Gyseghem, André van, 132 Habermas, Jürgen, 110–11, 112 Haffenden, John, 228–29n32 Hajkowski, Thomas, 81, 206n111 Half-Caste (Dover), 91 Hall, Radclyffe, 97 Hall, Stuart, 19

261 INDEX

Hand That Rocks the Cradle, The (BBC series), 152, 159, 160–61 Hardy, Thomas, 89 Harris, Donal, 10 Haveth Childers Everywhere (Joyce), 57–58, 213n59 Hayman, David, 51, 56 Heard, Gerald, 96 Heffernan, Michael, 44 Hegelian historicism, 16–17 Heinemann (publisher), 233n7 Hemingway, Ernest, 49 Hendy, David, 22 Hepburn, Allan, 5 Heppenstall, Rayner, 189 “Hérodias” (Flaubert), 70 Hill of Devi, The (Forster), 219n43 Hilmes, Michele, 81, 157 Hindi (language), 189 Hinduism, 89 Hindustani (language), 11, 12, 92, 189, 229n35 historical novel: Sunlight on a Broken Column and, 153, 165–72, 178, 182, 183; In Transit and, 153, 165–72, 178, 236n51; women and, 166–68 Historical Novel, The (Lukács), 166, 167–68, 171–72 historicism, 84–85, 90 History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom (Briggs), 31, 32–34 History of the Russian Revolution (Trotsky), 223n72 Hodson, H. V., 102 Hoffman, Frederick, 228n21 Hogarth Press, 227n15 Holden, Inez, 3, 127 “Hollow Men, The” (Eliot), 183 Home Service: Chitale and, 236n51; Forster and, 84, 103; Hosain and, 238n76; Joyce and, 39, 187; music and, 91, 117, 121; Nicolson’s broadcast on Joyce and, 45–46, 63, 95. See also Third Programme Homer, 149 Horizon (magazine), 127 Horkheimer, Max, 110

Hosain, Attia: career at the BBC, 238n76; Eastern Service and, 153, 182, 187, 189; Eastern Service’s women’s programs and, 151–52, 157–58, 160–63; Forster and, 89; media differentiation and, 8; Pakistan Service and, 152; photograph of, 153; remediation and, 193–94; remediation of novel and radio and, 4–5, 156–57, 164, 185–86, 190. See also Sunlight on a Broken Column (Hosain); social feminism and, 160–63; Third Programme and, 163–65, 189 Hosain, Attia—works: Phoenix Fled, 161–62. See also Sunlight on a Broken Column (Hosain) Howards End (Forster), 84, 107, 238n78 Huckleberry Finn (Twain), 222n69 Huggan, Graham, 85 Hughes, Richard, 231n62 Hussain, Iqbalunnisa, 155 Hussein, Waris, 233n7 Hutchins, Patricia, 239n2 Huxley, Aldous, 220n53, 227n15 Hyde, Douglas, 76 hypermediacy, 7–8, 234n16 I Speak for Myself (BBC series), 239n3 Ibsen, Henrik, 132 imaginary conversation genre, 239n11 Imaginary Conversations (BBC program), 189 “In Memory of Ann Jones” (Thomas), 127–28 “In Memory of Ernst Toller” (Auden), 145–46 In Transit (Chitale): bildungsroman and, 153, 165, 236n51; compared to Sunlight on a Broken Column, 178, 179, 181, 182–83, 184; composition and publication of, 160, 187; feature genre and, 172–78; historical novel and, 153, 165–72, 178, 236n51; intimate and kaleidosonic styles in, 5, 132, 154, 173–78; reception of, 154–56, 183, 232n7

262 INDEX

India: BBC and, 188. See also Eastern Service; censorship in, 97, 114, 191, 221n58; censorship on Eastern Service and, 12–13; Cripps Mission and, 126–27; Emergency in, 191; gender roles in, 166–67, 170–71; German broadcasts and propaganda in, 6, 12, 13, 14, 80, 114. See also Azad Hind Radio; Japanese propaganda in, 14; nationalist movement and independence struggle in, 165–66, 168, 175–77, 178–82; radio penetration and access in, 14; shortwave technology in, 28–29 India League, 236n51 India Office, 12 India Speaks (Anand): Bengal Famine and, 119, 129, 133–35; censorship and, 119; composition and production of, 130; impatience in, 148; juxtapositions in, 132–35; Living Newspapers and, 131–32; public sphere and, 120, 129–30; radio play and, 135–36; social realism and, 143; Unity Theatre and, 227n15 Indian Anglophone literature: Forster and, 97–98, 99–100; origins of, 154–55, 193; women writers and, 154–55. See also specific authors and works Indian Short Stories (Anand), 238n75 Indian Writing (magazine), 97, 100, 121–22, 123 Indian Writing in English (Iyengar), 232n7 Indo-Pakistani War (1965), 239n13 Institut Radiophonique D’Extension Universitaire, 64–65 intermediality, 3–4, 7, 21–22, 194, 197. See also media convergence and differentiation; remediation of novel and radio International Congress of Writers (Paris, 1935), 223n72 internationalism, 23, 80–83, 142 intersectional feminism, 161–63 intertextuality, 118–19, 136–42, 148

Interventions (journal), 18 intimacy: Forster’s talks and, 79, 108, 112; radio and, 24–29; women’s programs and, 158 intimate style: Anand and, 132; Chitale and, 132, 154, 173–78 Iqbal, Mohammed, 92 Ireland: censorship in, 215n92; Joyce and, 68, 76; radio in, 43–44, 59. See also 2RN (Irish national radio); Irish music: BBC and, 59; Joyce and, 43–44, 48 Isherwood, Christopher, 96, 222n66 Ishvani, G., 155 Island is a World, An (Selvon), 194 “Isles of Greece, The” (Byron), 125 “Ivy Day in the Committee Room” (Joyce), 70 Iyengar, K. R. Srinivasa, 98, 99, 156, 183, 232n7 Jain, Jasbir, 233n7 James, C. L. R., 19, 91, 173, 193 James Joyce (Levin), 69 Jameson, Fredric, 77, 84, 151 Japan, 14 Jenkins, Henry, 7–8 Jenkinson, Hilary, 32–33 Jog, N. G., 218n24 John Lane (publisher), 45 John Murray (publisher), 227n15 Johnson, Samuel, 174 Joint Broadcasting Committee (JBC), 201–2n37 Jolas, Eugene, 63–64, 66, 71, 214n68 Jonathan Cape (publisher), 213n59, 227n15 Joshi, Priya, 167, 221n64, 233n9 Journey to the Border (Upward), 5–6 Joyce, Giorgio, 47–48 Joyce, James: Anand and, 232n75; compared to Forster, 77; Home Service and, 39, 187; Leavis on, 40, 62–63, 64, 66; public sphere and, 44–45; radio lectures and programs on, 64–65, 66–74, 91, 98–99, 197, 239n2; as radio listener, 39–40, 41,

263 INDEX

43–44; radio publicity for Giorgio and, 47–48; remediation of novel and radio and, 4–5, 8, 151. See also Finnegans Wake (Joyce); Spender’s obituary for, 65–66; stream of consciousness technique and, 66, 149–50. See also Finnegans Wake (Joyce) Joyce, James—works: Anna Livia Plurabelle, 213n59; Dubliners, 70; Haveth Childers Everywhere, 57–58, 213n59; “Ivy Day in the Committee Room,” 70; The Mime of Mick Nick and the Maggies, 213n59; A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 68, 70–71, 99, 139; Two Tales of Shem and Shaun, 213n59. See also Ulysses; Work in Progress (Joyce) “Joyce and the ‘Revolution of the Word’ ” (Leavis), 62–63 Julius Caesar (Shakespeare), 92 Jung, Carl, 71 Kafka, Franz, 231n70 kaleidosonic style, 5, 132, 154, 173–78 Kalliney, Peter, 19 Kamala (Satthianadhan), 167, 172 Kapital, Das (Marx), 147 Kaul, R. K., 233n7 Kaul, Suvir, 179 Keane, Damien, 15, 59, 100 Keate, George, 105 Kerr, Douglas, 81 Khare, Leelabhai Ganesh. See Chitale, Venu (later Leelabhai Ganesh Khare) Khare, T. G., 236–37n51 Kingsley, Charles, 147 Kipling, Rudyard, 57 Kirkpatrick, B. J., 96 Kitchen in Wartime, The (BBC series), 152 Kittler, Friedrich, 6, 211n42 Knight, Lynn, 233n7 Labour Research Department, 104 Lacey, Kate, 116, 152, 156–57, 158

Lady Chatterley’s Lover (D. H. Lawrence), 95, 97 Lage der arbeitenden Klasse in England, Die (Engels), 147 Lago, Mary, 112–13, 217n17 Lamming, George, 19, 136–37, 141, 193, 203–4n73 Lane, Allen, 130 Larbaud, Valery, 65 Last September, The (Bowen), 182–83 Latin American Service, 11 Lawrence, D. H., 62, 94–95, 97, 227n15 Lawrence, T. E., 94, 96, 124 Lawrence & Wishart (publisher), 227n15 League of Nations, 223n72 Leavis, F. R., 40, 62–63, 64, 66 Lecky, William, 173 Lee Boo, 105 Lehman, John, 189, 207n122 Léon, Paul, 46–47 Lester, Sean, 43 Letter to Madan Blanchard, A (Forster), 105 Letters from England (ɇapek), 103 Letters of D. H. Lawrence, The (Huxley), 220n53 Letters on India (Anand), 227n15 Levin, Harry, 69, 213n59 Lewis, C. S., 86 Lewis, Wyndham, 67 Lewty, Jane, 55 Life and Letters To-day (magazine), 227n15 Life’s Shadows (Guru), 87 Listener (BBC publication): Ackerley and, 221n58; Anand and, 227n15; BBC archives and, 31–32; Colonial Office and, 224n77; contents and progressive views of, 91–92; Eliot and, 41, 69; Forster and, 91, 92, 219n41; Orwell and, 189; promotion of Finnegans Wake and, 41, 69; remediation of novel and radio and, 7; Spender’s obituary for Joyce in, 65–66; Third Programme and, 91–92 Literature and Authorship in India (Iyengar), 98, 99

264 INDEX

Little Clay Cart, The (ɭʷdraka), 160 “Little Gidding” (Eliot), 218n27 little magazines: importance of, 119–20; networks of distribution and, 10; New Soundings and, 117, 189; Others as, 9; public sphere and, 119–20; Voice and, 3, 115, 120–22, 128–29. See also Indian Writing (magazine) Living Newspapers, 131–32 local color, 141, 193 “Locksley Hall” (Tennyson), 174 “London as I See It” (BBC broadcast), 118–19, 136–41, 148–49, 150 London Calling (BBC journal), 115 London Transcription Service, 201–2n37 Lonely Londoners, The (Selvon), 141, 194–96 long-wave technology, 28 Lu Xun, 118 luddism, 136, 143, 145, 147 Ludovici, Anthony, 217n24 Lukács, Georg, 166, 167–68, 171–72 MacCarthy, Desmond, 23, 83 Macmillan War Pamphlets, 92 MacNeice, Louis, 21 Maconachie, Richard, 78 Malati and Madhava (Bhavabhuti), 160 Mann, Thomas, 91 Mannin, Ethel, 161 Mansell, Gerard, 188–89, 224n76 Manual of Archive Administration (Jenkinson), 32–33 Marathi (language), 11, 152, 159, 164 March of Time, The (NBC program), 174 “Marching Through Georgia” (song), 237n69 Marconi, Guglielmo, 216n16 Marcus, Jane, 115, 230n53 Marg (magazine), 187 Marinetti, F. T., 10, 228n20 Marson, Una: anniversary of British abolition of slavery and, 173–74, 175; Caribbean Voices and, 119, 204n80; Eastern Service and, 115, 116; Eastern Service’s Voice and, 119, 173–74, 175, 204n80; photograph of, 115, 116

Martin, Kingsley, 159 Marx, Karl, 147 Marxist fiction, 100 Maschinenstürmer, Die (Toller), 118–19, 145–49 Masood, Syed Ross, 86, 105–6 Matheson, Hilda: Fielden and, 11; Forster and, 94; Joint Broadcasting Committee and, 201n37; Joyce and, 45–46; talk genre and, 23–25, 67, 78; Talks Department and, 12 Maurice (Forster), 94, 96–97 Mayo, Katherine, 237n52 McCleery, Alistair, 45 McFarlane, Basil, 197 McFarlane, James, 216n13 McGann, Jerome, 9 McHugh, Roland, 54 McKenzie, D. F., 10–11 McLuhan, Marshall, 74–75 media convergence and differentiation: concept of, 8. See also remediation of novel and radio media determinism, 7 media ecology, 6–7, 22, 120, 132. See also remediation of novel and radio media studies, 29–30 medium-wave technology, 6–7, 28 Meet My Friend (BBC series), 117–18 Melville, Herman, 221n58 “Men of 1914,” 67, 149–50 Mendes, Alfred, 197 Menon, Krishna, 130 Menon, Narayana: Eastern Service and, 115, 116; Forster and, 77, 84, 87, 92, 218n27, 222n66; The Little Clay Cart and, 235n31; photograph of, 115, 116 Micir, Melanie, 96–97 microphones, 7, 25–28, 78, 117 Midnight’s Children (Rushdie), 155, 178, 190–92 Mime of Mick Nick and the Maggies, The (Joyce), 213n59 Mimic Men (Naipaul), 136–37 Ministry of Information (MOI): All India Radio and, 201n37; Bengal Famine and, 100; British identity

265 INDEX

and, 4; Eastern Service and, 12–13, 114; Forster and, 80–83, 100; Talking to India and, 203n69 Minty Alley (James), 193 Mittelholzer, Edgar, 197 modernism: Anand and, 3, 116, 117, 129, 138–39, 141–42; book history and, 9; Forster and, 77–81, 92–93, 95, 101, 112–13; historicism and, 84–85; Hosain and, 183; hypermediacy and, 7–8; Leavis on, 62–63; periodical studies, 9; propaganda and, 15; stream of consciousness technique and, 66, 149–50, 195–97, 219n45; transnational commerce of ideas and, 43, 115–19. See also little magazines modernities, 88–90 Mohanty, Chandra, 161 Monitoring Service, 228n32 Monnier, Adrienne, 65 Monroe Saw and Co., 47 Montesquieu, 137 Moretti, Franco, 149–50 Morris, John, 227n11 Morrisson, Mark, 10, 119 Moses Ascending (Selvon), 196 Mother India, 166–67, 170 Mother India (Mayo), 237n52 Mrs. Dalloway (Woolf), 133, 148, 232n75, 240n18 Mudrarakshasa (Vishakhadatta), 160 Mufti, Aamir, 233n8 Muir, Edwin, 91 Mukherjee, Ankhi, 191 Mukherjee, Meenakshi, 166, 183, 232n7 Murder in the Cathedral (Eliot), 159–60 Murphet, Julian, 8, 151 music: BBC and, 59; Home Service and, 91, 117, 121; Joyce and, 39, 43–44, 48; microphones and, 26; radio and, 51; in In Transit, 175–76 Myers, L. H., 222n66 mythical method, 67–68, 69 Naidu, Sarojini, 11–12 Naipaul, V. S., 18–19, 136–37, 141, 193, 195

Narayan, R. K.: bourgeois characters by, 166; Eastern Service and, 14; Forster and, 89–90, 97; Indian Anglophone literature and, 155, 193; Indian Writing and, 121–22; Listener and, 91 Nasta, Susheila, 114, 156 Nation and Athenaeum (newspaper), 221n62 National Council for Civil Liberties (NCCL), 221n62 naturalism, 22, 132 Navire d’Argent, Le (literary magazine), 49 Needham, Anuradha Dingwaney, 233n8 Nehru, Jawaharlal: Anand and, 131, 148; Fielden and, 11–12; in Midnight’s Children, 191; nationalist movement and, 168; Orwell on, 127; in Sunlight on a Broken Column, 155; in In Transit, 155 networks of distribution, 10 New Criticism, 127–29, 149 New Science (Vico), 210n29 New Soundings (BBC program), 117, 189 New Statesman and Nation (magazine), 46 New Statesman (magazine), 113, 159, 227n15 New York Herald (newspaper), 47 Nicholas, Siân, 81, 102, 218n32, 227n11 Nichols, Beverly, 111 Nicolson, Harold, 45–47, 63, 64, 95, 131 Night Shift (Holden), 3 Nine Drawings (Vicky), 111 Nineteen Eighty-Four (Orwell), 187 No More Peace (Toller), 145–46 Nordic Twilight (Forster), 92 North, Michael, 230n56 Nosca, Bianca, 152, 159 Nouvelle Revue Française (literary magazine), 65 Noyes, Alfred, 45–46 O’Brien, Vincent, 43–44 O’Casey, Sean, 53, 130–31 O’Connor, Frank, 45 Odyssey (Homer), 149

266 INDEX

Ogden, C. K., 70 Ong, Walter, 22 Onions and Opinions (Jog), 218n24 orality, 22 Orientalism, 228–29n32 Orientalism (Said), 106 Oroonoko (Behn), 174 Orwell, George: on Anand, 150; Anand and, 126–27, 227n15, 228–29n32; anniversary of British abolition of slavery and, 175; censorship and, 97; Chitale and, 159, 164, 175, 236n51; Cripps Mission and, 126–27; Eastern Service and, 13, 14, 15, 17–18, 81–83, 114, 115, 116, 187, 193; Eastern Service’s Voice and, 117, 120–22, 125–26, 127–29; Empson and, 228–29n32; Forster and, 218n24; on Indian Anglophone writing, 98; photograph of, 115, 116; Third Programme and, 33, 189 Orwell, George—works: Nineteen Eighty-Four, 187; Talking to India, 92, 203n69 Others (magazine), 9 Pakistan, 165–66. See also Partition of India Pakistan Service, 152, 154, 182 paratextual elements, 9 Parker, Dorothy, 173–74 Parratt, Nancy, 116 “Parrot in a Cage, The” (Hosain), 238n75 Partition of India, 180–82, 183, 189 Pasmore, Victor, 138 Passage to India, A (Forster): Anand and, 133–34; as based on experiences in Egypt, 224n86; Forster on, 97; friendship in, 105–8, 113; Masood and, 105–6; nationalism and, 84; reception of, 86, 101; Said on, 101, 106–7 Pastor Hall (Toller), 145–46 Paul, Elliot, 63, 214n68 Pemberton, Christopher, 116 P.E.N. Club, 92 Penguin Books (publisher), 95, 130, 227n15 Penguin New Writing (magazine), 227n15

People of India, The (Goshal), 111 periodical codes, 10 periodical studies, 9–10 Péron, Alfred, 46 Persian Letters (Montesquieu), 137 Persian Painting (Anand), 91 Phoenix Fled (Hosain), 161–62 phonograph, 211n42 Pitt, William, 174 plantation gothic, 238n77 Pleasures of Poetry, The (Sitwell), 220n53 Plomer, William, 96 Poetry in Wartime (Tambimuttu), 106 Poetry London (literary magazine), 228n21, 230n54 Portable James Joyce, The (Levin), 213n59 Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, A (Joyce), 68, 70–71, 99, 139 postcolonial studies, 18, 42, 72, 83 Potter, Simon, 14, 30, 206n111 Pound, Ezra, 67, 68, 70, 71, 209n21, 230n56 Poverty (Rowntree), 61 Prabhavananda, Swami, 222n66 “Primal Sound” (Rilke), 211n42 Pritchett, V. S., 31, 34, 189 Pritt, D. N., 130 Private Life of an Indian Prince (Anand), 232n75 private sphere, 157–63 Problem of India, The (Shelvankar), 97 Professor, The (Warner), 5–6 Programme Previews (BBC program), 158, 160 Progressive Writers Association, 100. See also Indian Writing (magazine) “Prologue to an Adventure” (Thomas), 118–19, 139–40, 148–49 propaganda: Colonial Office and, 101–4; Eastern Service and, 1, 15–17, 80–83, 135–36; Forster and, 80–83; Germany and, 6, 12, 13, 14. See also Azad Hind Radio; Japan and, 14; modernism and, 15. See also Ministry of Information (MOI)

267 INDEX

Proust, Marcel, 77, 91, 96 public sphere: Anand and, 120, 129–30; Joyce and, 44–45; little magazines and, 119–20; radio and, 110–11; Some Books and, 112; women and, 157–63, 171–72 queer writing, 84, 93–97 Question Time (2RN program), 43–44 Rabaté, Jean-Michel, 50, 61 Rabinow, Paul, 117 radio: Anand and, 141–42; Brecht on, 7, 51, 118; Culture Industry thesis and, 110; diffusionist model of culture and, 81, 115–16; feature genre and, 21–22, 172–78; as international medium, 81; intimacy and, 24–29; in Ireland, 43–44; Joyce and. See Finnegans Wake (Joyce); Joyce as listener, 39–40; Leavis on, 62–63; Marinetti and, 10, 228n20; microphones and, 7, 25–28, 78, 117; Midnight’s Children and, 190–92; public sphere and, 110–11; Said and, 109; scholarly interest in, 20–21; secondary orality and, 22; shortwave broadcasting and, 4, 6–7, 28–29, 84–85; as source of institutional and financial support for writers, 109–10, 136; temporalities and, 84–85, 116–17; women’s programs and, 151–52, 157–63. See also remediation of novel and radio; talk genre Radio Éireann, 44, 45. See also 2RN (Irish national radio) Radio Modernism (Avery), 23, 25 Radio Pakistan, 187–88 radio play, 135–36, 173 radio studies, 11, 17, 20–21, 20–21, 31, 81, 115 radiogenic forms, 20, 22, 151 Ranade, Ramabai, 170 Rao, Raja, 97, 155, 193 Read, Herbert, 91, 127 Received Pronunciation, 79 Reid, Forrest, 96

Reith, John: censorship and, 95–96; Colonial Office and, 101–2; Eastern Service and, 11, 31; Forster and, 94; imperial values of, 81; Joyce and, 45–46; on radio, 23; Received Pronunciation and, 79 Reith Lectures, 109 remediation, concept of, 7 remediation of novel and radio: Anand and, 4–5, 114–15, 151. See also Big Heart, The (Anand); Chitale and, 4–5, 154, 185–86, 190, 193. See also In Transit (Chitale); Eastern Service and, 4–5, 17–18, 35. See also Voice (BBC program); Forster and, 4–5, 7, 151, 193–94. See also Some Books (BBC program); Hosain and, 4–5, 164, 185–86, 190, 193–94. See also Sunlight on a Broken Column (Hosain); Joyce and, 4–5, 8, 151. See also Finnegans Wake (Joyce); mutual impacts of, 4–8, 151–52; Rushdie and, 190–92; Selvon and, 193, 194–96; sociology of texts and, 10–11; temporalities and, 9–10 Rendall, R. A., 202n53, 216n14 Requiem (Toller), 145–46 respet des fonds, 31–32 revivalism, 136 Revolt in the Desert (T. E. Lawrence), 124 “Revolution of Language and James Joyce, The” (Jolas), 64 “Rhapsody, The” (Selvon), 197 Rhys, Jean, 118, 183 Rhys, Keidrych, 230n54 ribbon microphones, 26–28, 117 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 211n42 Rimbaud, Arthur, 118, 137 Ritchie, Charles, 217n16 Robeson, Paul, 131 Robinson, Henry Morton, 40, 54–55 Rogers, George, 47–48 Romance of Tristan and Iseult, The (Bédier), 51, 53 Ronaldshay, Lord, 91 Rowntree, B. Seebohm, 61 Roy, Srirupa, 226n2 Rushbrook Williams, L. F., 12, 188, 193

268 INDEX

Rushdie, Salman, 34, 63, 155, 178, 232n7 Ryder, Arthur William, 235n31 Sabarmati Ashram, 147–48 Said, Edward, 101, 106–7, 109 Saint-Amour, Paul K., 204n74, 218n31 Sandys, Duncan, 130 Sanskrit literature, 160, 164 Sarabhai, Bharati, 98 Satanic Verses, The (Rushdie), 63 Satthianadhan, Krupabai, 167, 172 Saxena, Akshya, 18 Scannell, Paddy, 25–26, 27, 29, 206n111 Scholes, Robert, 10 School of Oriental Studies, 12 Scott, Walter, 155, 169, 183 scripts, 31–32, 215n87 Scrutiny (journal), 40, 62–63 secondary orality, 22 Selvon, Samuel, 19, 136–37, 141, 193, 194–96 Sen, Nikhil, 86 Señora Carrars Rifles (Brecht), 130–31 “September 1939” (Auden), 122–24 sexism, 157. See also gender roles Shaheen, Mohammed, 104 Shakespeare, William, 64, 92, 159–60, 164 Shamsie, Kamila, 232–33n7 Shamsie, Muneeza, 232–33n7 Shaw, George Bernard, 118, 132 Shaw, Irwin, 229n47 Shelvankar, K. S., 97, 121–22 shortwave broadcasting, 4, 6–7, 28–29, 84–85 Sickert, Walter, 138 Siepmann, C. A., 205n95 Sieveking, Lance, 21–22, 173 Singh, Amardeep, 108 Singh, Purun, 143 Sinha, Babli, 15, 129 Sinhalese (language), 11 Sircar, Noel, 159 Sitwell, Edith, 220n53 Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake, A (Campbell and Robinson), 40 slavery, 154, 172–78

Slocum, John, 213n59 Smith, Zadie, 17, 18, 101 social feminism, 160–63, 171, 233n7 social realism, 142–45, 153 sociology of texts, 10–11 Some Books (BBC program): book review genre and, 111–12; censorship and, 84, 90–91, 93–97; contents and transnational scope of, 85–90; Indian writers and, 86–89, 97–98, 99–100; postcolonial criticism and, 83–84; propaganda directives and, 80–83; public sphere and, 112; queer writing and, 93–97; radio lecture on Joyce and, 40–41, 63, 69, 91, 98–99; talk genre and, 78–80 Sorabji, Cornelia, 155 Southard, Barbara, 171 Spender, Stephen, 65–66, 145–46, 189 Spodek, Howard, 147–48 Srinivasan, Ragini Tharoor, 222n68 Stallybrass, Oliver, 220n47 Star Turns Red, The (O’Casey), 130–31 Starting Point (Day Lewis), 5–6 Stein, Gertrude, 64 Stephens, James, 40–41, 72–74, 189 Stephenson, Donald, 188–89 Stokes, Leslie, 227n11 “Story by Five Authors” (Forster et al.), 219n45 “Storyteller, The” (Benjamin), 111 Strachey, Lytton, 96 Stramm, August, 64 stream of consciousness technique: Forster and, 219n45; Joyce and, 66, 149–50; McFarlane and, 197; Selvon and, 195–97 Strong, L. A. G., 40–41, 63, 70–72 Stuart, Francis, 100 studios, 25 ɭʷdraka, 160 Sunlight on a Broken Column (Hosain): Anand and, 238n78; as autobiographical, 181–82; bildungsroman and, 153, 165, 178, 182–85; compared to In Transit, 178, 179, 181, 182–83; composition of,

269 INDEX

163–65; glossary in, 164; historical novel and, 153, 165–72, 178, 182, 183; Indian nationalist movement and independence struggle in, 178–82; reception of, 154–56, 232–33n7 Sutaria, Sejal, 159 Swanzy, Henry, 19–20, 141, 193, 194 Swift, Jonathan, 137 Swingler, Randall, 129 Sword and the Sickle, The (Anand), 87, 124–25, 127, 227n15 Sword of the Spirit, The (Swingler), 129 Synge, J. M., 232n75 Tagore, Rabindranath, 218n27 Tales of Four Friends (Chaudhuri), 218n27 talk genre: characteristics of, 21–28, 78; Forster and, 69, 78–80, 206n107; Matheson and, 23–25, 67, 78. See also Talks Department Talking to India (Orwell), 136, 203n69 Talks Department, 11, 12, 90–91, 221n58 Tambimuttu, M. J.: Eastern Service and, 14, 115, 116; Forster and, 83, 86, 106; photograph of, 115, 116; Poetry London and, 228n21, 230n54 Tamil (language), 11 telegraph, 216n16 telephone, 53–54, 58 temporalities: Anand and, 115; Eastern Service and, 16–17; Forster and, 83–85, 90; radio and, 84–85, 116–17; relationship between metropole and colony and, 8, 16–17, 83–85; remediation of novel and radio and, 9–10; Sunlight on a Broken Column and, 153; In Transit and, 153 Tennyson, Alfred, 174 Textile Labour Association, 147–48 Thacker, Andrew, 10 Theall, Donald, 75 Third Programme: Eastern Service and, 33–34, 90, 91, 117, 187, 189–90; Eliot and, 189; Forster and, 33, 187, 189; Hosain and, 163–65, 189; Joyce and, 187; Listener and, 91–92; New

Soundings and, 117, 189; Orwell and, 33, 189 “third-world women,” 161 This Quarter (literary magazine), 49 Thomas, Dylan: Anand and, 118–19, 139–40, 148–49; Third Programme and, 189; Voice and, 127–28 Thorburn, David, 7–8 Through Eastern Eyes (BBC program), 135, 172–78 Tiffin, Helen, 118 Time and Western Man (Lewis), 67 Times (newspaper), 45, 46 Times Literary Supplement (magazine), 127 Toller, Ernst, 118–19, 132, 145–49 Tolstoy, Leo, 118 “Tragedy of Ah Q, The” (Lu), 118 transatlantic review (literary magazine), 41, 48–56, 58 transition (literary magazine): Beach on, 65; Leavis on, 62–63; Work in Progress and, 49, 57–59, 214n68 translation and untranslatables, 163–65 Travis, Alan, 221–22n65 Treece, Henry, 127, 128 Trilling, Lionel, 77 Trinidad Guardian (newspaper), 194 Tristan und Isolde (Wagner), 210n30 Trotsky, Leon, 223n72 Twain, Mark, 222n69 Twice Born Fiction, The (Mukherjee), 232n7 Twilight in Delhi (Ali), 97 Two Cheers for Democracy (Forster), 83, 92, 219n41 Two Tales of Shem and Shaun (Joyce), 213n59 Two Worlds (literary magazine), 49 2RN (Irish national radio), 42–43, 57, 58–59, 61, 76 Tzara, Tristan, 49 Ulrich, Carolyn, 228n21 Ulysses (Joyce): Anand and, 99, 232n75; censorship and, 45–46, 65–66; composition of, 44; Eliot on, 67–68;

270 INDEX

Ulysses (Joyce) (continued) Forster and, 95–96; “Hades” episode in, 197; Leavis on, 62–63; Nicolson’s broadcast on, 45–46, 63, 95; Odyssey and, 149; “Penelope” episode in, 196; publication and reception of, 64, 65; radio as source for, 44; Selvon and, 196; Strong on, 70 “Ulysses, Order, and Myth” (Eliot), 67–68 Unity Theatre (London), 129–32, 145–46, 227n15 Untouchable (Anand): agents of empire in, 133; compared to The Big Heart, 143, 144, 148; Forster and, 97, 227n15; Gandhi and, 147; reception of, 115, 149 untranslatables, 163–64 Upward, Edward, 5–6 Urdu (language), 154, 163–64, 182, 189 Valéry, Paul, 65, 223n72 Verdict on India (Nichols), 111 Verma, Neil, 25, 132, 154, 173 vernacular language: Caribbean Voices and, 19–20; Eliot and, 230n56; Marson and, 204n80; Selvon and, 141, 194–96 Vicky, 111 Vico, Giambattista, 71, 72, 210n29 Village, The (Anand), 91, 124–25 Virago Press, 233n7 Vishakhadatta, 160 Vision of Vasavadatta, The (Bh‫ک‬sa), 160 Viswanathan, Gauri, 14, 219n40 Voice (BBC program): Anand and, 3–4, 115, 117, 119, 122–26, 127–29, 148; Chitale and, 159–60; first installment of, 120, 127–29; little magazines and, 3, 115, 120–22, 128–29; Marson and, 119, 173–74, 175, 204n80; Orwell and, 117, 120–22, 125–26, 127–29; scholarship on, 117 WAC (BBC Written Archives Centre), 30–32 Wagner, Richard, 210n30 Walcott, Derek, 18–19

Wales (literary magazine), 230n54 Walkowitz, Rebecca, 133 Wallace, Diana, 166 Walpole, Hugh, 222n69 Wandlung, Die (Toller), 145 War and Peace (Tolstoy), 118 Ware, Susan, 156–57 Warner, Michael, 17, 222–23n70 Warner, Rex, 5–6 Warner, Sylvia Townsend, 96–97 Waste Land, The (Eliot), 118, 139, 140–41, 149, 228n21 Watkins, Vernon, 189 Weaver, Harriet Shaw, 72, 209n22, 214–15n84&85 Well of Loneliness (Hall), 97 Well of the People, The (Sarabhai), 98 Wells, H. G., 25, 118 Whitehead, Kate, 189, 227n11 Whittier, John Greenleaf, 174 Whittington, Ian, 21 Wide Sargasso Sea (Rhys), 118 Williams, Eric, 237n60 Williams, Raymond, 6, 75, 216n16 Wilson, Henry, 105 Wollaeger, Mark, 15 women: as broadcasters and listeners, 152–54. See also women’s programs; historical novel and, 166–68; Indian Anglophone literature and, 154–55. See also Chitale, Venu; Hosain, Attia; public and private spheres and, 157–63, 171–72. See also feminism; gender roles; women’s rights Women of the West (BBC program), 159 Women’s Programme (BBC program), 152 women’s programs, 151–52, 157–63 women’s rights: Indian nationalist movement and, 152–53; suffrage movement and, 166–67, 171; in Sunlight on a Broken Column, 184–85 Woolf, Leonard, 122, 227n15 Woolf, Virginia: Anand and, 86–87, 118, 148, 227n15, 230n52, 232n75; Forster and, 221n62, 222n69; radio and, 23,

271 INDEX

24–25, 31, 83, 122; Selvon and, 240n18; Sickert and, 230n52. See also Mrs. Dalloway (Woolf) Work, Henry Clay, 237n69 Work in Progress (Joyce): Beach on, 65; censorship and, 45; Eliot and, 67; Leavis on, 62–63; polarized reception of, 63–64; radio as inspiration for polylogue style of, 41–43; radio for

promotion of, 46–47; sales of, 213n59; transition and, 49, 57–59, 214n68 Workers’ Theatre Movement, 131 Writing in a Foreign Tongue (BBC program), 163–65 Yeats, W. B., 145–46, 209n20, 232n75. See also Development of William Butler Yeats, The (Menon)

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