Making Britain South Asian Visions of Home and Abroad 1870– making-britain

Rabindranath Tagore arrives in Britain in 1878 and is awarded the Nobel Prize in 1913 Dadabhai Naoroji, an Indian nationalist, is elected as Liberal MP for Central Finsbury in 1892 Britain’s first mosque, the Shah Jahan Mosque in Woking, is built in 1889 T. N. Mukharji’s A Visit to Europe is published in 1889, and B. M. Malabari’s The Indian Eye on English Life in 1893 The writings of students and activists circulate, while Indian soldiers who fought in the First World War write letters to their families at home

Indian novelist and activist Mulk Raj Anand arrives in England in 1925 and publishes Untouchable, the first of several novels, in 1935 Sri Lankan poet M. J. Tambimuttu launches and edits the magazine Poetry London (1939–51) Krishna Menon, Secretary of the India League, campaigns for Indian independence, serves as Labour councillor for the London borough of St Pancras, and is founding editor of Pelican Books Other South Asian writers of the 1930s and 1940s include G. V. Desani, Aubrey Menen, Attia Hosain and Cedric Dover Ayahs, sepoys, lascars and other working-class Indians come to Britain, many settling here in the face of race and class oppression

Britain’s first mosque, the Shah Jahan Mosque, Woking, built in 1889 (photograph by Rozina Visram, 1998)

London writers and poets reading from their work, 1940s (BBC and the British Library; from R. Visram’s Asians in Britain)

Lascars on board ship in the East India Dock, London, 1908 (Museum of London, Docklands Collection; from R. Visram’s Asians in Britain)

Lal Khan, ex-sailor and pedlar of Castlecaulfield, N. Ireland, with his wife Mary, their three children and Mary’s younger brother (Narinder Kapur; from R. Visram’s Asians in Britain)

Texts to examine include the literary, historical, political, visual, autobiographical and journalistic outputs of South Asian intellectuals, writers, activists and artists Archival sources include the British Library’s Oriental and India Office, the National Archives (PRO), newspaper/journal holdings at Colindale, the missionary archives (SOAS), art archives (V&A), BBC Radio archives, publishers’/authors’ archives, as well as private holdings The work of postcolonial, cultural and materialist critics will provide a core methodological framework

How did the aesthetic/political debates engaged by migrant South Asians contribute to the genesis of Britain’s postcolonial vision? How did their activities create conditions for transnational interconnection? Under what circumstances did they form networks in Britain? Under what circumstances did they publish/perform/exhibit in Britain? To what degree did their construction of ideas of imperial citizenship and cultural difference contribute to the formation of British Asian identities at the time and in the present day? What were the cultural, economic, social and political barriers this ‘community’ negotiated? How did their creative outputs and political interventions impact on entrenched concepts of cultural purity and national superiority?

Annotated database of selected materials accessible through our project website (see A series of workshops, as well as a wrap-up conference at the British Library, with an exhibition subsequently available to public libraries A monograph; articles; critical editions of unavailable texts; a sourcebook