An ‘Impatient Modernist’: Mulk Raj Anand at the BBC

An ‘Impatient Modernist’: Mulk Raj Anand at the BBC Daniel Ryan Morse Abstract: Mulk Raj Anand’s self-description – in a 1945 broadcast about war-time London – as an ‘impatient modernist’ highlights Anand’s ability to harness the velocity of broadcast production, transmission, and reception into an aesthetic of speed. Pairing Anand’s unpublished BBC scripts with his war-time novel The Big Heart (1945), I show how Anand’s work remediating contemporary texts for broadcast accompanied a shift in his approach to writing fiction, using the technique of intertextual scaffolding to accelerate composition. This article proposes that the name of Anand’s impatience was realism – that Anand’s fascination with literary modernists such as Joyce and Woolf was tempered with a desire for the immediacy and social embeddedness of realism and that broadcasting encouraged Anand in his attempt to pair modernism’s cosmopolitanism and polyvocality with realism’s speed, engagement, even ephemerality. Challenging the often feeble distinction between realism and modernist anti-representational technics, Anand’s radio writing captures the contradictions of combined but uneven development. Keywords: Mulk Raj Anand; Eastern Service; BBC; Third Programme; radio. In November 1942, 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, London, to discuss the influence of India on English literature for the BBC programme Voice. 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 as Modernist Cultures 10.1 (2015): 83–98 DOI: 10.3366/mod.2015.0099 © Edinburgh University Press www.euppublishing.com/journal/mod Modernist Cultures not only 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 a growing critical engagement with ‘the presence of black and South Asian intellectuals on the cultural scene’ in interwar London.1 Yet while Anand’s broadcasts and 1945 novel The Big Heart (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. Radio studies, when tuned to Anand’s transnational work, is uniquely positioned to intervene in and provide a new model for modernist studies as it grapples with critiques of the western diffusionist model of culture.2 The ‘impatient modernism’ developed by Anand at the BBC and facilitated by the technology of short-wave radio reveals a significant shift in the relationship between literary modernism and colonial modernity. The instantaneous radio link between London and India on the BBC’s Eastern Service joined Voice’s forward-thinking analysis of how culture ‘at home’ was altered by the colonies, doubling the sense in which the standard narrative of colonial temporal backwardness was here refuted. The program’s stress on literary cooperation and mutual influence was embedded in its very DNA – Anand planned the discussion with Orwell, recommended most of the works discussed, and personally arranged for copyright payments to his fellow Indian writers.3 Contrary to the intentions of the BBC leadership and subsequent received wisdom, empire broadcasting illustrates the extent to which the colonies affected the homefront, a significant example of a larger pattern identified by Paul Rabinow, whereby ‘the colonies constituted a laboratory of experimentation’.4 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, England’s post-war cultural channel.5 The Eastern Service was the first widespread realization of the BBC’s lofty civilizing goals, the place where the abstract idea of a serious and cultural service was put into practice, even though such a minority station was imagined well before the war. The spirit of invention at the heart of the Eastern Service allowed Anand to explore, evaluate, and develop a wide range of aesthetic 84 Mulk Raj Anand at the BBC responses to modernity. Anand’s self-identification in one of his broadcasts as an ‘impatient modernist’, eager to modernise 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.6 Between 1942 and his return to India in 1945, Anand wrote or broadcast over sixty programs for the Eastern Service. During his years as a regular contributor, Anand 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. His literary broadcasts demonstrate a wide transnational purview as he adapted Chinese writer Lu Hsun’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. Following both a new push within modernist studies as well as a critical procedure modeled by Voice, this article argues for and employs a relational model of modernism that ‘stresses the condition or sensibility of radical disruption and accelerating change wherever and whenever such a phenomenon appears, particularly if it manifests widely’.7 Doing so flies in the face of the traditional narrative of international modernist aesthetics, with the West coming first and the ‘rest’ lagging behind. As Aamir Mufti points out, according to the facile Eurocentric ideology ‘cultural objects from non-Western societies can be grasped only with reference to the categories of European cultural history, as pale or partial reflections of the latter, to be seen ultimately as coming late, lagging behind, and lacking in originality’.8 Abandoning the practice of defining modernism metonymically or through a laundry list of formal features, and instead positing it as a wide range of responses to modernity, goes a long way in overcoming these perceptual problems. More specifically, it allows us to recognize Anand’s use of intertextuality as a cooperative rather than derivative project. As the participants in Voice made clear, modernism on the BBC was not a singular or exclusive canon of works, set of formal features, or even a unique posture. Instead of curating and presenting what the contributors thought to be the best works in a given genre, the process of selection hinged on exploring representation as a problem without a singular solution. Anand’s broadcasts and novel register and further radical – and increasingly rapid – cultural upheaval with a descriptive and diagnostic power that reveals the severely attenuated ability of hypercanonical modernism alone to illuminate the complex relays of modernity. 85 Modernist Cultures 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 speeding 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 post-colonial 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.9 Anand’s extensive use of intertextuality taps into elements of both; in ‘London As I See It’ Anand 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. While Bertolt Brecht was complaining 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.10 Rather than ‘making 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. Anand’s 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 the classics to reference contemporary texts by writers he knew personally, employing the structure or scaffolding of these works to shape his content. Writing for radio altered Anand’s aesthetic as well as the way his work created a global present, providing a valuable model to readers in the current moment seeking to understand radio’s acceleration of modernism. While radio studies has done much to usefully complicate how modernism unfolded within the context of the nation, the global has not been part of its brief. Todd Avery’s Radio Modernism, for example, challenges the presumed divide between modernist writers and mass media, looking more specifically at how a number of British writers – including Woolf, Eliot, and Wells – turned to the airwaves to disseminate their political and aesthetic ideas, often 86 Mulk Raj Anand at the BBC clashing with administrators by attempting to push the boundaries of accepted topics of discussion. The later collection, Broadcasting Modernism, further advanced the field by examining a wider crosssection of writers and forms to show how radio was central to modernism, but it largely overlooked empire.11 Radio studies is poised to extend its valuable contributions to modernist studies by adopting a transnational framework. Grappling with radio’s instantaneity and internationalism brings to the fore a model of modernity usefully at odds with the European diffusionist narrative, highlighting coeval developments in metropole and colony. *** Anand uses intertextuality extensively and powerfully in a 14 February 1945 broadcast in the series ‘London as I See It’. Though the series was meant to capture what was assumed to be a bewildering first impression of the imperial metropolis, Anand turns this assumption on its head by underscoring that an unmediated experience of London was impossible for colonial subjects. 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.12 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’ (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 at St. Paul’s and other buildings which owe their existence to the genius of Wren. I learnt to appreciate the beauty 87 Modernist Cultures 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. (London 1) Between the colours of Pasmore and the ‘irony and pathos’ of Sickert, Anand’s London was not one of modernity’s supposed shocks, but rather one already thoroughly processed. 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’ (London 2). The swift accumulation of literary references is symptomatic of the way in which almost all of 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’ (London 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. 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 towns of the smoke by the use of electricity, built functional houses, offices, theatres, and public buildings?’ (London 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 Eliot’s The Waste Land, Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal, and Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. However, none of these texts have 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 88 Mulk Raj Anand at the BBC as I See It’ forms a conversation with Dylan 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’ in Anand’s hands becomes ‘As I walk along, as I walk along the streets and lanes of London [. . . ] as I walk along the streets of London’ (London 1).13 Both pieces are concerned with similar characters – policemen, ‘loose’ girls, 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’ (‘Prologue’ 57) 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’ (London 2). 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’ (London 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. 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 speaks to any of the characters he encounters; there is no interaction, only sights perceived. Despite Anand’s restrained prose and imagery, which establishes 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 [. . . ] 89 Modernist Cultures 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. (London 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 the nerves’ not only because it is being played on a ‘broken viola’ but also because it pulls the publicans 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. *** If Anand is impatient with modernization in London, he is equally concerned about India and takes up the issue of industrialization in the novel composed during his employment at the BBC, The Big Heart. Viewed from one angle, The Big Heart seems to fit in well with Anand’s earlier novels, focusing on the trials and tribulations of a working-class character attempting to realize his socialist ideals and modernizing impulses. 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 around which Anand was raised, 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 [the novel’s protagonist] Ananta’ and Margaret Berry claiming that Anand’s inclusion of tension between sub-castes – and even between individuals within sub-castes – ‘renders his message more than usually realistic’.14 But while The Big Heart fits well in the Anandian oeuvre in those ways, it is unique among his novels as an adaptation of another work. The Big Heart catalogues some of the many ruptures wrought by modernization but does so by undermining claims to authenticity 90 Mulk Raj Anand at the BBC and realism, introducing 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. Though Anand’s experience with radio may have had minimal impact on the content of his works, it had a significant impact compositionally; to overlook this change is to miss precisely how Anand was an impatient modernist. To understand how the novel performs this reversal, however, it will be useful to point out how and why it has so far been understood as an example of social realism. Part of the reason is extra-textual – Anand’s participation in the All-India Progressive Writers Union (whose manifesto calls for social realism) – as well as his own statements that he was attempting to bring this kind of writing to India. 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’.15 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 presentation of the working-class Ananta as a hero and its frank depiction of hunger, poor working conditions, and widespread poverty, the novel outwardly conforms to the genre. And yet the novel is a departure for Anand in how thoroughly it emphasizes mood and imagery. As opposed to the sprawling narrative of the trilogy or even the open-endedness of Untouchable, The Big Heart achieves dramatic effect through careful control of mood and the repetition of key images. 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.16 91 Modernist Cultures The dream’s sources of images, the cinema and ancient 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. The recurring image of destruction is expounded upon throughout the novel, coupled with that of circling crows, ‘ominous birds’ that Ananta observes repeatedly (BH 197). Ananta glimpses shadows, ghosts, and skeleton-like figures throughout, suggesting Expressionism more than social realism. The stylistic impurity the novel revels in, its combination of social realism and Expressionism, is highly concentrated in the novel’s preface, an excerpt from Lord Byron’s speech on the Luddites to the House of Lords. 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 1923 as ‘The MachineWreckers’), which opens with a translation and adaptation of Byron’s speech in verse.17 In fact, the working title of The Big Heart was The Machine Wreckers.18 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 – returns home after organizing unions in other cities, manages to talk the workers out of violence by spreading the idea of trade unionism, and so on. 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.19 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’; similarly, Ananta is haunted by Kali’s stomping.20 Using the plot and characters of ‘The Machine Wreckers’ as scaffolding for his novel, Anand here eschews an individual standpoint in favor of what Deleuze and Guattari call ‘a collective enunciation’.21 Not only does the novel form a conversation with a well-known play in leftist circles, but by mining a recent play rather than a classical source the novel demonstrates the extent of modernity’s acceleration. Working in radio accentuated Anand’s commitment to internationalism, sharpened his skills at remediation, and contributed to Anand’s fascination with the speed of modernity. 92 Mulk Raj Anand at the BBC This emphasis on speed and the overlapping of English and Indian temporalities is most clearly articulated in the novel’s references to radio. Unlike in his previous work, where news between colony and metropole travelled slowly by boat, here characters in the novel are in near-simultaneous link with Europe through their wireless sets. Ananta’s opposite, Satyapal, is modeled on Toller’s John Wibley who steals Cobbett’s power by advocating violence, arguing ‘we must have deeds, not words!’.22 Cobbett’s response to Wibley, ‘one would think you had no wish to free them, but only to revenge yourself’ is echoed and extended by the narrator in The Big Heart, who makes a forceful link between Satyapal’s egomania and German fascist radio:23 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. (BH 193) Satyapal’s obsession with German radio, a repeated trope in the novel, stands metonymically for the new perception of global linkedness and simultaneity offered in The Big Heart. Ananta and his fellow coppersmiths lose work not simply because of industrialization in general, but more specifically because of the construction of factories that provide goods for the British war machine. Radio provided Anand with a new way to think through and represent these links. *** One of the major themes of Anand’s war-time writing, developed in The Big Heart and his broadcasts alike, is that of an unprecedentedly globalized world. Returning to Anand’s participation in Voice highlights his ability to perceive how events outside the purview of his English colleagues were shaping the new world order. In the second installment of Voice, Anand makes his interest in intelligibility and political commitment clear, proposing the inclusion of a scene from T. E. Lawrence’s Revolt in the Desert (1927) in which Lawrence is waiting to dynamite a train. William Empson disagrees with Anand about its importance, arguing: ‘Ah, that was a different war. Lawrence 93 Modernist Cultures 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’.24 Empson insists on works that feature trenches and machine warfare and represent the existential crisis faced by the individual soldier and by extension the European world-view; 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 important in 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’s understanding of war literature is based in Europe and by labeling the Arabic independence movement as ‘different’ and ‘minor’, participates in a larger English habit of dismissing antiimperial struggle as a series of isolated events rather than a tradition.25 The First World War was largely a contest over empire, though the new terrifying technologies of warfare may have obscured that for Empson; events during the Second World War and after show how circumscribed Empson’s viewpoint was. 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 centre-piece 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) shows the events leading to the protagonist, 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 trenches is just as shocking and devastating to Indian soldiers as it is to their English, Scottish, and Irish comrades, it is faced 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 Singh mirror larger tensions and struggles in India. Singh’s personal disappointments – at not being rewarded with the land, medals, or money with which the Army lured Indian soldiers – are placed in the larger context of economic recession, the flu epidemic, and the imposition of the Rowlatt Acts. The novels thus show how the personal world of Lal Singh mirrors larger events. The trilogy explores the 94 Mulk Raj Anand at the BBC 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 and temporal reach of the war. The first installment of Voice aired on 11 August 1942 and was dedicated to contemporary poetry, with the participants reading aloud from poems by Herbert Read, Dylan Thomas, and Henry Treece. 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 Mulk Raj Anand, John Atkins, and William Empson. The discussion of Dylan Thomas’s ‘In Memory of Ann Jones’ brings out important differences between these figures. Orwell, playing devil’s advocate, suggests: ‘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’.26 Empson, who had just read the poem aloud, takes offence and argues for close, rigorous analysis in the vein of New Criticism, ‘Lazy people, when they are confronted with good poetry like Dylan 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). The exchange between Orwell and Empson offers a view on debates of intentionality and the function of poetry. 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 without rigorous attention and study. Anand takes the conversation in a very different direction, blowing right past 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 disagreements staged between Empson and Anand are symptomatic of differing world views, both of which need to be taken into consideration. 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 95 Modernist Cultures 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 England as well, is a danger that we risk repeating if we consign Anand’s radio work to the ashbin of history. Anand’s impatient modernism restores a useful focus on temporality, showing how radio studies is poised to contribute to pressing discussions in modernist studies. The instantaneity of transnational radio serves as an invitation and spur to think through the coeval development of radio technology, broadcasting programs and practices, and – by extension – modernities in different global locations. Acknowledgements The Center for the Humanities at Temple and the Department of English, Temple University generously supported research for this paper. I am glad to thank Priya Joshi and Paul Saint-Amour for their thoughtful feedback on previous versions of this essay. Notes 1. Jane Marcus, Hearts of Darkness: White Women Write Race (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2004), p. 181. In highlighting the transnational and cosmopolitan strand in Anand, my work joins a small but growing movement to revise accounts of modernism’s internationalism. See also, for Anand, Jessica Berman, Modernist Commitments: Ethics, Politics, and Transnational Modernism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011) and Kristin Bluemel, George Orwell and the Radical Eccentrics: Intermodernism in Literary London (New York: Palgrave, 2004). For recent scholarship employing non-Eurocentric conceptions of modernism, see – among others – Rebecca Walkowitz, Cosmopolitan Style: Modernism Beyond the Nation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006); Jed Esty, Unseasonable Youth: Modernism, Colonialism, and the Fiction of Development (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012); and Priya Joshi, In Another Country: Colonialism, Culture, and the English Novel in India (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002). 2. For examples of these critiques, see 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: Princeton University Press, 2000); and Dilip Gaonkar (ed.), Alternative Modernities (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001). 3. Letter to Orwell. 15.11.42. Contributor file: Mulk Raj Anand. BBC Written Archives Centre, Caversham, Reading (hereafter BBC WAC). 4. Paul Rabinow, French Modern: Norms and Forms of the Social Environment (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989), p. 289. 96 Mulk Raj Anand at the BBC 5. 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 Kate Whitehead, The Third Programme: A Literary History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 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. Additionally, E. M. Forster – a mainstay of the Eastern Service – exerted what one BBC employee called ‘considerable influence’ on George Barnes as Barnes was organizing the Third. See Mary Lago, Linda Hughes, and Elizabeth Walls (eds), The BBC Talks of E. M. Forster 1929–1960 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2008), p. 5. 6. Mulk Raj Anand, ‘London as I See It’ BBC Eastern Service. London. 14 February 1945. Typescript. Contributor file: Mulk Raj Anand, BBC WAC, p. 3. Hereafter cited parenthetically as London. 7. Susan Stanford-Friedman, ‘Definitional Excursions: The Meaning of Modern/ Modernity/Modernism’, Modernism/Modernity, 8.3 (2001): 493–513, p. 503. 8. Aamir Mufti, ‘Global Comparitism’, Critical Inquiry 31.2 (2005): 472–89, p. 474. 9. Helen Tiffin, ‘Post-Colonial Literatures and Counter-Discourse’, in Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin (eds), The Post-Colonial Studies Reader (New York: Routledge, 2006), pp. 99–101. 10. Bertolt Brecht, ‘The Radio as a Communications Apparatus’, in Brecht on Film and Radio, ed. Marc Silberman (London: Methuen, 2000), pp. 41–6. 11. Michael Coyle’s contribution on T. S. Eliot’s broadcasts to India is a notable exception, though it focuses on the place of the broadcasts in Eliot’s oeuvre and his evolving conceptions of culture. See Michael Coyle, ‘We Speak to India: T. S. Eliot’s Wartime Broadcasts and the Frontiers of Culture’ in Debra Rae Cohen, Michael Coyle, and Jane Lewty (eds), Broadcasting Modernism (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2009), pp. 176–95. One gets a sense of the importance of the Eastern Service from the extent to which even things seemingly unconnected to India, like James Stephen’s obituary for Yeats or T. S. Eliot’s critical work on Edgar Allan Poe were written for, and channeled through, the Eastern Service (and only subsequently reprinted). The oeuvre of E. M. Forster was significantly altered by his engagement with the Eastern Service, with roughly half of Two Cheers for Democracy deriving from his BBC work. For more on Forster’s contributions to the Eastern Service, see Daniel Morse, ‘Only Connecting?: E. M. Forster, Empire Broadcasting and the Ethics of Distance’, Journal of Modern Literature 34.3 (2011): 87–105. In these and many other examples, the intellectual demands of Indian listeners set the parameters of and bankrolled the literary work performed in England. 12. The extent to which Anand’s vision is mediated through art – painting, architecture, and literature – also unsettles the idea that Anand’s work is merely a straightforward example of 1930s literature or social realism. 13. Dylan Thomas, ‘Prologue to an Adventure’, Dylan Thomas: Early Prose Writings, ed. Walford Davies (London: Dent, 1971), pp. 57–61, p. 57. Hereafter cited parenthetically as ‘Prologue’. 97 Modernist Cultures 14. Mulk Raj Anand, Author to Critic: The Letters of Mulk Raj Anand, ed. Saros Cowasjee. (Calcutta: Writers Workshop, 1973), p. 122 and Margaret Berry, Mulk Raj Anand: The Man and the Novelist (Amsterdam: Orient Press, 1971), p. 49. 15. Anand, Author to Critic, p. 116. 16. Mulk Raj Anand, The Big Heart (London: Hutchinson International Authors, 1945), p. 9. Hereafter cited parenthetically as BH. 17. Toller was widely known for his Expressionist plays and radical politics; he was imprisoned after leading the Bavarian Soviet Republic. Toller’s Die Wandlung (1919) was released to wide-spread renown. Stripped of his citizenship by the Nazi Party, he had a warm reception in England: Stephen Spender translated Pastor Hall; 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 Yeats and Freud. 18. Saros Cowasjee, So Many Freedoms: A Study of the Major Fiction of Mulk Raj Anand (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 127. 19. Ernst Toller The Machine Wreckers, in Seven Plays, trans. Ashley Dukes (New York: Liveright, 1936), p. 43. 20. Ibid. 21. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 1986), p. 17. Deleuze and Guattari’s theses on ‘Minor Literature’, developed to discuss the works of Franz Kafka, parallel Anand’s work and could be fruitfully extended to Anand’s entire generation of Anglophone Indian novelists. 22. Toller, The Machine Wreckers, p. 24. 23. Ibid. p. 25. 24. George Orwell, Keeping Our Little Corner Clean: 1942–3, ed. Peter Davison, The Complete Orwell (London: Secker & Warburg, 2001), p. 19. 25. This trend is explored much more extensively in Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage, 1994). 26. George Orwell, All Propaganda is Lies: 1941–2, ed. Peter Davison, The Complete Orwell (London: Secker & Warburg, 1999), p. 464. Hereafter cited parenthetically as All. 98