‘Making Britain: South Asian Visions of Home and Abroad, 1870-1950’ is a three year project (2007-10) funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. Making Britain examines South Asian contributions to Britain’s literary, cultural and political life in the period 1870-1950. Complicating the common perception that a homogeneous British culture only began to diversify after the Second World War, it explores how an early diasporic population made an impact on British life and helped to form contemporary Britain’s cultural-political identities. The project combines extensive archival research and an interdisciplinary approach as it seeks to illuminate the diverse ways in which South Asian writers, artists, activists and professionals in Britain formed affiliations, networks and solidarities to create a dynamic ‘contact zone’ at the heart of empire.

Making Britain is led by Professor Susheila Nasta (Open University), in collaboration with Professor Elleke Boehmer (University of Oxford) and Dr Ruvani Ranasinha (King’s College London), and Research Assistants Dr Sumita Mukherjee (Oxford), Dr Rehana Ahmed (Open), and Dr Florian Stadtler (Open). The team is working in partnership with the British Library and SALIDAA, and in consultation with leading scholars Dr Rozina Visram, Professor Lyn Innes, Professor Partha Mitter and Dr Deborah Swallow.

Building on historian Rozina Visram’s seminal work Asians in Britain: 400 Years of History, as well as scholarly initiatives by leading members of the core and advisory teams, this collaborative, interdisciplinary project seeks to uncover and examine South Asian participation in intellectual and literary networks, art movements, and activist groupings during this under-explored period of Britain’s multicultural history. To date the contribution to British modernist movements of writers such as Mulk Raj Anand and J. M. Tambimuttu has been largely overlooked, despite Anand’s close links with the ‘Bloomsbury group’ and Tambimuttu’s editorship of the influential magazine Poetry London. While the British ventures of political figures such as M. K. Gandhi, Muhammad Ali Jinnah and Jawaharlal Nehru have been well documented, yet to be explored in depth is, for example, the impact on British cultural and political life of Krishna Menon, Labour councillor for St Pancras and founding editor of Pelican Books. Earlier still, sisters Cornelia and Alice Sorabji and travel writers B. M. Malabari and T. N. Mukharji were producing a range of narratives commenting on Britain and refracting dominant perceptions of the nation’s culture; while Syed Ameer Ali, founder of the Muslim League’s London branch, was campaigning for the political and cultural rights of Muslims in India and Britain. letters, diaries, newspaper articles and photographs record the presence in Britain of lascars, soldiers, ayahs and other working-class South Asians, and reveal their contribution to the creation of a dynamic ‘contact zone’ at the very heart of empire.

By focusing on the early presence in Britain of South Asians, and on the numerous modes in which they inflected ideas of Britishness and laid the ground for the construction of new multiple identities, Making Britain seeks to heighten awareness of the breadth and depth of the South Asian contribution to British culture.

In 2008, Making Britain held two workshops. The first, ‘South Asian contact zones in the metropolis’, was held at the Institute of Historical Research, Senate House, London on 23 April 2008. Keynote speakers were Antoinette Burton (University of Illinois) and Partha Mitter (Emeritus Professor of Art History, University of Sussex). Antoinette Burton’s paper, ‘Locative Positions, Transnational Methods: The Case of the Coolie Doctor’ used the case study of a migrant doctor’s patient narrative, Coolie Doctor: An Autobiography, to address the methodology of transnationalism, and Partha Mitter’s paper, ‘Exploring the Virtual Cosmopolis’, addressed the ideas of cosmopolitanism in relation to Bengali intellectuals in Calcutta. The workshop also had a panel on ‘Indians on the Celtic Fringe’ with papers by Jennifer Regan (Queen’s University, Belfast) on Dadabhai Naoroji’s Irish network and Churnjeet Mahn (University of Surrey) on “Scottish Asians”. The day was rounded off with a plenary panel by the Making Britain team that introduced the project and their plans to produce a database housing visual tools to imagine South Asian interactions with British life, an interactive timeline of events in Britain relating to South Asian presences, and an annotated bibliography of selected materials relating to South Asian individuals, organizations and journals in Britain during the period 1870 to 1950. This database will be launched in September 2010.

The second Making Britain workshop, ‘Investigating Asian Bloomsbury’, was held on 5 July 2008 at the St John’s College Research Centre, Oxford. The keynote speaker was Kristen Bluemel (Monmouth University) with a paper entitled ‘Intermodernism and Mulk Raj Anand: No Apology for Heroism’. Santanu Das (Queen Mary, University of London) also gave a detailed paper on Indian sepoys in the First World War entitled ‘Sepoys and Sahibs: India, Empire and First World War Writing’. These papers set the theme for a workshop that sought to redefine Bloomsbury, Central London, as a site of cross-cultural interaction and exchange and explore the varied ways South Asian writers, editors and soldiers negotiated and reshaped this iconic space. Papers in a panel on ‘Bloomsbury Encounters’ were given by Anna Snaith (King’s College, London) on Mulk Raj Anand and the Hogarth Press, Ruvani Ranasinha (King’s College, London) on the journals Indian Writing Magazine and Poetry London, and Susheila Nasta (Open University) on the hidden presences and friendships between South Asians and the British in Bloomsbury. A panel on ‘The Contours of Asian Bloomsbury’ saw papers given by Elleke Boehmer (University of Oxford) on the “Zig-Zag” of Early Bloomsbury and modernism, Rehana Ahmed (Open University) on Krishna Menon and Working-Class South Asians, and Sumita Mukherjee (University of Oxford) on the “native costumes” of Indians in London.

In the Spring Term of 2009, Making Britain convened a seminar series at the Institute of English Studies in London on the theme of ‘South Asian resistances’ to Britain. The first paper by Alex Tickell (Portsmouth) was on “horrorism” and theorizing violence in light of the activities surrounding India House, 1905-1909. Anne Kershen (Queen Mary, University of London) spoke on the Aliens Acts of the early twentieth century and the language of immigration. Prabhjot Parmar (Royal Holloway, London) gave a paper on the letters of Indian soldiers who fought in WW1. Michèle Barrett (Queen Mary, University of London) spoke on the Imperial War Graves Commission and the commemoration of Indian soldiers. Jacqueline Jenkinson (Stirling) was scheduled to speak on the 1919 Glasgow riots, but this talk was cancelled because of the heavy February snow. This paper will be rescheduled for some time in May.

The Making Britain project will be holding two further workshops in 2009. In July 2009, a workshop will be held in collaboration with the ‘Framing Muslims’ project. In October 2009, a workshop will be held at the October Gallery on ‘Representations’. With these various symposia, the project hopes to shed light on the varied interactions and presences of diverse South Asians in Britain, 1870-1950.

A final conference will be held at the British Library in London in September 2010 where the database will also be launched.
The team can be contacted via email at: arts-making-britain@open.ac.uk
More details can be found on their website: http://www.open.ac.uk/Arts/south-asians-making-britain
Dr.Sumita Mukherjee, University of Oxford