Anticipatory anti-colonial writing in R.K. Narayan's Swami and Friends and Mulk Raj Anand's Untouchable

This article uses the term “anticipatory anti-colonial writing” to discuss the workings of time in R.K. Narayan’s Swami and Friends and Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable. Both these first novels were published in 1935 with the support of British literary personalities (Graham Greene and E.M. Forster respectively) and both feature young protagonists who, in contrasting ways, are engaged in Indian resistance to colonial rule. This study examines the difference between Narayan’s local, though ironical, resistance to the homogenizing temporal demands of empire and Anand’s awkwardly modernist, socially committed vision. I argue that a form of anticipation that explicitly looks forward to decolonization via new and transnational literary forms is a crucial feature of Untouchable that is not found in Swami and Friends, despite the latter’s anti-colonial elements. Untouchable was intended to be a “bridge between the Ganges and the Thames” and anticipates postcolonial negotiations of time that critique global inequalities and rely upon the multidirectional global connections forged by modernism

Sam Selvon with Susheila Nasta

An interview with Sam Selvon by the Editor of Wasafiri, Susheila Nast

Beyond the millennium: Black women's writing

Nasta's piece forms part of an oral contribution to the plenary session of the conference in which a variety of speakers discussed the many questions that the conference had raised. It focuses specifically on the location and history of black women's writing in Britain and attempts to address issues that have dominated critical and theoretical discussion for some years. The question as to how far we have moved on in our reading and assessment of these literatures is discussed; also the fact that perhaps debates we now see as being contemporary were also current in the experiences of earlier representations of Britain from a black or Asian perspective. Nasta makes some tentative suggestions in terms of how we might move forward

Sealing a friendship: George Orwell and Mulk Raj Anand at the BBC (1941-43)

Exploration of the relationship between Mulk Raj Anand and George Orwell whilst they were working at the BBC Eastern Service during World War 2

End of empire and the English novel

On 2 November 2011 contributors to the volume 'End of Empire and the English Novel since 1945', (ed. Bill Shwarz and Rachel Gilmore), explored the history of post-war England through their readings of a range of writers and genres. Professor Susheila Nasta, a respondent in the discussion, raised the question of why there still remains an inability in much post-war English fiction to imaginatively engage directly with the realities of migration, decolonisation, immigration and cultural co-existence

Abdulrazak Gurnah's 'paradise'

Discusses question of literary value and the Booker Prize. Provides new material on Gurnah's shortlisted novel Paradise in the light of prize debates; also contains new and original material on the novel and its composition