{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.032027527792482795, 'fraction_numerical': 0.005823186871360508, 'mean_word_length': 5.164763458401305, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
South Asians Writing Resistance in Wartime London

The title of the magazine Indian Writing (IW), edited by four South Asian writeractivists Iqbal Singh, Ahmed Ali, Krishnarao Shelvankar and Alagu Subramaniam in wartime London suggests both its nationalist leanings and its diasporic location. Based at the Indian-run Bibliophile Bookshop at 16 Little Russell Street, just a stone’s throw from the British Museum, the magazine comprised short pieces of fiction and non-fiction and book reviews by South Asians predominantly. Among its primary aims, articulated in the editorial of its first issue, were to publish literature ‘alive with the realities of to-day’, to ‘interpret’ the ‘cultural implications’ of ‘the awakening of India’ and to bring the work of ‘significant Indian writers before a larger international audience’ (IW 1: 3 4). While it claimed to inhabit a space between ‘the rostrum and the ivory tower’ with its combination of the literary and the political, much of its content expressed the editors’ anti-colonialism (IW 2: 67). Thus, it brought South Asian literature and culture and the struggle for independence to the heart of the imperial metropolis. In this respect, Indian Writing was by no means unique. In fact, it could be seen as just one node of a literary-political network that extended across and connected British, South Asian and other colonial writers, intellectuals and activists in and around the publishing houses, public halls and student haunts in central London in the early twentieth century. Just a glance inside the covers of the five issues of this short-lived magazine, plagued by the shortage of paper and other economic constraints of wartime Britain, is suggestive of such a leftist, cosmopolitan sphere of cultural production. On display are advertisements for: the British periodical Life and Letters To-day featuring an article by the Indian film director, writer and journalist Khwaja Ahmad Abbas; renowned editor Cyril Connolly’s magazine Horizon; and actress and writer Beatrix Lehmann’s Our Time. Notices for publishing companies Lawrence & Wishart, Lindsay Drummond and Allen & Unwin highlight their Indian titles: Mulk Raj Anand’s Two Leaves and a Bud (which shares an advertisement with John Lehmann’s New Writing); Jawaharlal Nehru’s Glimpses of World History; and Raja Rao and Iqbal Singh’s anthology Changing India. The Charing Cross-based radical bookshop Collet’s (location of the Left Review) and New Books (‘the best left wing bookshop in London’) share the margins of the magazine with its own Bibliophile bookshop, as well as with an Indian food shop in London, Leicester Square’s Dildar Indian Restaurant, and a travel agent catering for Indian students on Bloomsbury Way. This snapshot is indicative of a significant infiltration by South Asian writers and their politics of the metropolis of Empire and, in particular, of its cultural world of books and magazines (Making Britain Database; Nasta, Home Truths Ch. 1; Ranasinha 15 39; Blair). Perhaps best known among the key South Asian figures who inhabited this sphere is the writer Mulk Raj Anand, who contributed a short story and reviews to Indian Writing. His metropolitan literary and political journey has been well documented * from his early writings on art and literature; through his establishment as a novelist with Wishart’s 1935 publication of Untouchable, and the string of novels and ardently anti-imperial writings that followed; to his role as broadcaster for the BBC Eastern Service under the directorship of George Orwell (Anand; Bluemel Ch. 2; Cowasjee; Nasta, ‘Between’ and ‘Negotiating’). Anand also worked as an editor for Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press, the company that in 1940 published Twilight in Delhi, Rehana Ahmed