subject: Who Have Radically Changed Contemporary Literature And Culture In Multicultural Britain [print this page] Ranasinha brings together two remarkably dissimilar writers who settled in post-war Britain: the self-effacing, commercially successful and now all but forgotten novelist Kamala Markandaya, and the radical socialist activist Ambalavener Sivanandan, who turned to fiction later in life. Markandaya, Ranasinha notes,'wrote about an India of the Western imagination for specific Anglo-American tastes' and her conspicuous translation of Indian contexts into an unconvincing English idiom is symptomatic of the 'discursive pressures operating on writers publishing fiction on India in an inhospitable climate'. Ranasinha demonstrates that while Sivanandan turned from political writing to fiction as a form of postcolonial activism and engagement, Markandaya eschewed both didacticism and literary experimentation; her consequent eclipse in the early 1980s indicates that her claim to authenticity was no longer tenable in the face of radically different, confident, and linguistically authentic narratives, most notably Rushdie's Midnight's Merrell Shoes Children.
Chapter 4 yokes together two writers of the post-independence generation, Farrukh Dhondy and Salman Rushdie, who have radically changed contemporary literature and culture in an increasingly consciously multicultural Britain. Ranasinha skilfully examines the reader report for Rushdie's first, failed manuscript submission to Jonathan Cape, and reminds us (this is scarcely acknowledged today) of the difficulty they faced in getting Midnight's Children reviewed before it won the Booker Prize. Finally, chapter 5 examines the construction of an emergent British Asian cultural identity through the examples of Hanif Kureishi and Meera Syal; Ranasinha's analysis of how both writers question and complicate issues of authenticity, while at the same time addressing multiple audiences, is particularly good. One of the great strengths of this study is the inclusion of detailed assessments of the negotiated (and sometimes constricted) cultural space occupied by writers like Chaudhuri and Markandaya, who for their own ideological and aesthetic reasons, either refused or failed to engage with postcolonial theory. Ranasinha's book would have been further strengthened with a greater scepticism about her authors' political claims. In particular, Rushdie's untenable self-definition as part of the 'new Left' or Kureishi's paradoxical insistence on Muslim identity as essentially fixed and monolithic while subscribing to a liberal humanist belief in individual self-development ought to have been contested more explicitly.
One sense in which Ranasinha's book already delineates a closed historical period is in its emphasis on examining a self-contained circuit of colonial exchange and its immediate aftermath, i.e. the bilateral cultural relationship between Britain and South Asia. While Ranasinha does acknowledge the difference in the literary reception, readership awareness, publishing contracts and institutional recognition of South Asian writers between Britain and America, the central focus of her study is the centripetal relationship between the literary core of London and its colonial and postcolonial South Asian hinterland, something that has been largely superseded in the last decade of free-market globalisation and the increasingly direct marketing and publishing of South Asian (especially Indian) writers in the USA, evinced by recent studies by Sarah Brouillette and Merrell Boot Claire Squires.
South Asian Writers in Twentieth-Century Britain is an excellent work: meticulously researched, wide-ranging in its scope, intellectually ambitious, inclusive in its use of methodology from book history, publishing and cultural studies, intelligently and confidently argued and fluently written. Greater than the sum of its parts, this book is far more than a work of cultural recovery, or a history of the reception of either Anglophone South Asian writers or their British Asian successors in the twentieth century. By deliberately juxtaposing complementary case studies, Ranasinha deftly resists totalising narratives of cultural assimilation or resistance, and instead offers her readers new and compelling perspectives on the enriching and transformative cultural change wrought by (and sometimes wrought upon) South Asian writers on a constantly evolving twentieth-century British literary marketplace.
