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Ranasinha, Ruvani. South Asian Writers in Twentieth-Century Britain: Culture in Translation. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. viii + 302 pp. £50.00. ISBN 978–0–19–920777–0, Forum for Modern Language Studies, Volume 44, Issue 1, January 2008, Page 97, https://doi.org/10.1093/fmls/cqm152
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Extract
While offering close readings of a selection of texts, Ruvani Ranasinha's material analysis of South Asian Anglophone writing also explores the relationships between those texts and Britain's shifting socio-political landscape during the twentieth century. The first chapter usefully historicises the emergence and development of Britain's literary market for South Asian writing. Proceeding roughly chronologically, subsequent chapters consider texts written since the 1930s (and particularly since the Second World War and Indian Independence), taking the notion of translation as their major theoretical motif. Nirad Chaudhuri, M. J. Tambimuttu, Kamala Markandaya, A. Sivanandan, Farrukh Dhondy, Salman Rushdie, Hanif Kureishi and Meera Syal all receive particular attention. The work on earlier writers has benefited much from original archival research (most notably the archives of publishing houses), and the chapters which deal with more recent writers frequently offer fresh and insightful readings. While Ranasinha is suitably wary of delineating a “tradition” of South Asian writing in Britain, the accounts of figures such as Rushdie, Kureishi and Syal are much informed by the earlier chapters and succeed in providing innovative perspectives on texts which have been widely examined in recent years.
