The lion,the tiger and the kangaroo: A tale of transnational networks

Abstract

Commonwealth literary studies functioned for some time as comparative work across discrete national literary cultures. Using the curious instance of an Indian novelist finding publication with an Australian publisher, this article shows how similar and different colonial dynamics of literary production both kept national contexts meaningful and undid them through transnational connections.

Commonwealth literature has long since been overtaken by postcolonial literary studies and by global movements of people and the English language. It remains a foundation for much of the critical discussion framed by assumptions of common concerns amongst those seeking cultural self-determination amidst the ongoing legacies of imperialist power structures — albeit that a key commonality is the assertion of specific differences of history and cultural dynamics that shape literary expression and critical models of analysis. However, there is often a sense in contemporary scholarship that history has made the comparative nationalisms of Commonwealth studies obsolete: that things are much more complex these days, as nations inspect their own internal power differentials and the world of global capital subordinates the nation state to transnational networks of exchange and domination.

Nonetheless, one can often discover curious instances that show two things at once: that the national framework was meaningful and continues to exert an influence on cultural relations, and that even when decolonizing nationalist projects were at their height, transnational networks were already operating. Let me start to demonstrate this paradox with two literary critical stories.

Bhabani Bhattacharya enjoyed a good deal of attention in the early days of studies in Commonwealth literature. Although he was a contemporary of Mulk Raj Anand (to whom he is often compared), his novels did not begin to appear until after Indian Independence, after the initial late nineteenth-century pioneers and the 1930s first fruits of the “big three” of Indian English fiction: R.K. Narayan, Anand and Raja Rao. Bhattacharya was a freelance writer whose literary work comprised short stories and the novels So Many Hungers (1947), Music for Mohini (1952), He Who Rides a Tiger (1954), A Goddess Named Gold (1960) and Shadow from Ladakh (1966). Overall, their central concern is how the new nation will handle the clash between tradition and modernity, village and city, big business and Gandhian principles. He won India’s national literary award from the Sahitya Akademi in 1967. Eleven years later he published A Dream in Hawaii (1978), a satire of the West’s consumption of Eastern spiritualism.

With the exception of a few overseas enthusiasts (such as Kallinikova, Shimer, and Gemmill), and a couple of articles in journals such as World Literature Written in English and The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, all of the commentary on Bhattacharya has come from Indian scholars and been handled by Indian editors and publishers. The bulk of it appears from the mid-1960s through to 1990 and from 1980 starts to fade away dramatically (MLA, n.d.). Most of it concentrates on the author’s use of Gandhi (Gandhi, 2010: 168–72), on the depiction of women (Fisher, 1982; Prasad, 2013), and on debates over the merits of the work according to whether it succeeds in conveying Indian speech patterns without undue artifice (Mukherjee, 1971: 179–80), or whether it bogs down in social documentary and activist bias or achieves some aesthetic form (Sharma, 1979). To give but one example, Srinivasa Iyengar approves of A Goddess Named Gold because “the ‘axes’ here are hardly visible and the grinding is not very audible” (1962/1984: 418). Overall, Bhattacharya is contained within a decolonizing and reformist nationalist discourse centred entirely on India.

My second story is from Australia. Along with the Bulletin magazine, Angus & Robertson has been regarded as the quintessentially national publisher of Australian literature. Begun as a Sydney bookshop retailing works acquired in England, A&R published the two icons of Australian verse (Henry Lawson and “Banjo” Paterson) in 1896 and later went on to attempt whole series of Australian classics, thereby playing a crucial role in the foundation of school and university study of Australian literature (James and Webby, 1997). In recent times “book history” has become something of a scholarly “turn”, of relevance to postcolonial studies because it often calls into question the standard histories of literature and the values they rest on. The study of publishing houses and the mechanics of the publishing industry show how colonial power differentials permeate the production of literature just as much as the literature itself reflects and subverts colonial discourses. Until recently this more “mechanical” side to postcolonial literary studies has championed the decolonizing provincial publisher against the “evil empire” of metropolitan and globalizing enterprise, thereby preserving a nationalist focus on institutions such as Angus & Robertson. Certainly, building a national literary culture was part of the company’s agenda, and sometimes at odds with its financial best interests (Ensor, 2013). However, close investigation shows that literary histories based only on a discrete national story have to be supplemented and modified by other truths of a more transnational set of relations. In Australian literary studies, this general correction of the record is seen in Katherine Bode’s Reading By Numbers: Recalibrating the Literary Field (2012), and more particularly in Jason Ensor’s Angus & Robertson and the British Book Trade in Australian Books, 1930–1970: The Getting of Bookselling Wisdom (2013). While both studies place Australia’s literary culture in a wider international perspective than before, they do tend to present Euro–America as representing the transnational.

What is interesting about the two national stories outlined is that their seemingly discrete literary–cultural spaces not only come together but shift the picture of the transnational to include a more complex global network. Bhabani Bhattacharya’s second and third novels, Music for Mohini and He Who Rides a Tiger, were published by Angus & Robertson in 1959 and 1960 respectively.

No one seems to have commented on this curious fact. For obvious reasons of price and accessibility, Indian scholars appear to have worked almost exclusively from Indian editions of Bhattacharya’s work (Chandrasekharan, 1974; Dwivedi, 1987; Rai, 1995; Sharma, 1979). Until the opening up of the subcontinent to international commerce, Indian publishing was unfettered by copyright and often produced books with no details of their original dates and publishers, so it was hard for the scholar to get any sense of a book’s history. Thus late reprints in India for a Liverpool publisher declare that He Who Rides a Tiger is “First Published in U.K., 1988” and A Goddess Named Gold was “First Published in India by Arnold-Heinemann” (no date) and “First Published in U.K., 1986” (see Bhattacharya, Lucas Publications, 1988, 1986, respectively). S.K. Desai, who provides the authoritative Sahitya Akademi book on Bhattacharya’s work (1995), does mention the Angus & Robertson editions in the bibliography, but in his commentary refers only to the US editions and their subsequent translations into European languages. Ramesh Srivastava’s 1982 edited collection also lists the Angus & Robertson editions in the bibliography, but again no contributor comments on these, apparently taking for granted the apparent British publication of Indian English fiction. Those beyond the subcontinent have mostly worked from American editions. In both locations, scholarship has followed the general practice of the 1970s and 1980s of concentrating on thematic and linguistic studies of the novels’ contents (Harrex, 1977, for instance; and in India, Reddy, 1979; Rai, 1995; Sharma, 1979; Sorot, 1991), rather than on how the books got to print. Dorothy Blair Shimer, working from the US, uses only Indian editions in her commentaries. As one would expect from her Twayne World Authors study (1975), she does provide a comprehensive bibliography that includes mention of the Angus & Robertson editions, but describes each in the opening chronology as a “British edition (London)”.

Others have shown how the metropolitan–provincial binary of colonial literary history was shot through with lines of communication and exchange, making it much more complicated than the one-way transmission the two terms suggest. We know that London was used by colonials not only to curry favour through acts of cultural subservience, but to engage in both acts of self-assertion by way of appropriating the infrastructure of the metropolis (taking advantage of the BBC’s overseas networks to disseminate Caribbean writing, for example) and transactions that bypassed the “cultural centre” even while trafficking through it. Examples would be the connections between Irish and Indian writing (Raja Rao and Mulk Raj Anand finding inspiration from Joyce, Yeats, and Irish nationalism, for example [Anand, 1983: 36; Rao, 1963]), or the movements impelled or enabled by late colonialism that took Canadian Margaret Laurence to Africa and Trinidadian Ralph de Boissière to Australia. In this context, a link between an Indian author and an Australian publisher does not seem unusual. Nonetheless, it has been overlooked because of the “comparative nationalism” that survives into postcolonial literary studies (often with good reason, but sometimes with limiting effect). Attending to the meaning and history of the unusual blend of Indian writer and Australian publisher, shows something of the particular shape of transnational cultural relations under late colonialism and which can add some small light to the torch of postcolonial literary history.

Bhattacharya had excellent credentials as an Indian writer: he knew and had translated Tagore, met Gandhi in London in 1931 (Desai, 1995: 2; Shimer, 1975: 9, 12, 103), and critiqued British colonial management of the Indian economy during the Second World War. At the same time, he had gone to London to take higher studies in History (1927–34) during which time he wrote for papers such as the Manchester Guardian and The Spectator, travelled widely in Europe, and in 1949 went to Washington as press attaché to the Indian Embassy, eventually migrating to the US in 1972 (“Bhabani Bhattaharya”, n.d.; Shimer, 1975). Balancing his allegiance to his homeland with his international experience, Bhattacharya published his first novel in Bombay (with Hind Kitab, 1947) but  So Many Hungers was also issued through Victor Gollancz.  Apparently Bhattacharya’s wife encouraged him to send the manuscript to London, so he sent copies simultaneously there and to Bombay (Shimer, 1975: 17, 27). He was aided by the sudden move to India’s independence soon after he had completed the manuscript, since before then he saw no possibility of having the book come out under colonial censorship; hence his approach to “a publisher I admired in London” (Srivastava interview with Bhattacharya in Srivastava, 1982: 229–30). ¹

Victor Gollancz founded the Left Book Club, with Harold Laski, Professor of Political Science at the London School of Economics, as a partner (Simkin, 1997/2014). Laski was one of Bhattacharya’s teachers, so the writer was a little disingenuous when in interview he said he sent his manuscript off from India to “a leading London publisher” and got a “real surprise” when it was quickly accepted (Mahfil, 1968–69: 43). Apart from his good personal connections, Bhattacharya would have known that Gollancz was sympathetic to the Indian freedom struggle. Mulk Raj Anand took part in Left Book Club activities and had his fictional critique of tea plantations, Two Leaves and a Bud, published for it by Lawrence & Wishart (Anand, 1937; “Mulk Raj Anand”, n.d.; Neavill, 1971: 209n). Pandit Nehru gave a speech at its 1938 rally and attempted to have an Indian branch established (Kuracina, 2008: 176; Neavill, 1971: 210; Zacharia, 2004: 83). Nehru and Bhattacharya were also members of the League Against Imperialism (Shimer, 1975: 10–11). During his Washington sojourn, Bhattacharya sent the manuscript of Music for Mohini to Crown Publications in New York, which became his standard publisher from then on. Gollancz had a strategy of importing titles from the US and it may be that Crown and its predecessor, Outlet Book Co., were sources and thus known to the writer (Simpkin, 1997/2014; “Crown Publishing”, n.d.), but I have seen no definite information on this. India continued to issue paperback editions of Bhattacharya’s titles and had sole ownership of his short stories and historical writing, but Shadow from Ladakh (1966) came out again from New York, and also from London, this time with W.H. Allen. With his move to Hawaii and then mainland America, it is not surprising that his last novel, A Dream in Hawaii (1978) also came out through his New York publisher. It remains at least an historical curiosity, though, that two of his early works should appear through an Australian publishing house.

Publishing in India was part of the pull and push of global knowledge transfer and colonial control. Many of the first printing presses were the result of Christian evangelizing, and others were to promulgate East India Company regulations. ² After that, the imperial machinery both encouraged modern print culture and education and sought to keep them and their outcomes within manageable limits. Major British houses (Oxford University Press, Macmillan, Longman) were in India, but were mostly there to sell British books into schools, only being localized and opening up to Indian writers in the late 1960s (Sadana, 2012: 50). It is no accident, then, that Bhattacharya would go to an Indian company like Jaico or Hind. Bombay’s Jaico publishing house, established in 1946, looked to America rather than Britain to supply “affordable books in a developing nation” (Jaico, n.d.: n.p.) — another possible link with Crown Publishers. From its beginnings as an importing bookseller, Jaico went on to publish local work at low cost, by writers like Khushwant Singh, who was for many years the contributor to and editor of The Illustrated Weekly of India. Bhattacharya worked in Bombay for “the Weekly” (Desai, 1995: 3; Gemmill, 1975: 308) and his critique of Raj rule and fictional dramatizations of topical social issues suited the nationalist agenda of a press like Hind or Jaico. However, though his first language was Bengali, Bhattacharya chose to write in English (Gemmill, 1975: 300), and the Indian reading public for work in that language was somewhat limited in the 1940s. A writer in one of the major regional languages of the subcontinent could be widely influential but generally could not hope to make much money from literature. A writer in English, until the globalization of the Indian publishing scene in recent times, might do better financially, but only if he or she published overseas as well (Khair, 2001: 60). Bhattacharya had the contacts to make this possible. Although he published historical studies in Bengali and lived in India’s largest cities, he felt the protected enclave of Nehru’s India to be “a cultural backwater” and stifling (Gemmill, 1975: 307), so was pleased that his books circulated widely, doing consistently well in Europe in translation (1975: 301).

Australia, dominated by Anglo–Celtic culture in the 1950s, did not have the “language differential” to worry about in its publishing history, but was also subject to the constraints of a small market (simply because of low population numbers) and to discrimination from the old colonial metropolis. Britain’s Traditional Markets Agreement with the US meant that all books coming into Australia had to come through British publishers, and the Net Book Agreement prevented booksellers from undercutting prices set by the British book trade, even though it could dump cheap “colonial” editions on “traditional” markets (Ensor, 2013: 14). Because of shipping times, colonial booksellers had to order sight-unseen or on recommendation of agents, and on the pretext of shipping costs publishers could reduce payments to colonial writers. A writer could only hope to make decent money from gaining access to British (and Commonwealth and US) readers, and that usually meant going to a London publisher.

Angus & Robertson had to publish some Australian writers by buying plates from Unwin and Macmillan in London (Ensor, 2013: 3). Very quickly, it decided that it needed to have a foot in the British publishing door, and set up a London agency in 1913, eventually trading under its own name in 1938. This followed Australia’s Tariff Board Inquiry of 1930, which sought to impose taxes on imported books, based on the problem that local publishers faced taxes on importing paper, ink and type, while overseas titles arrived tax free. The refusal to bring in an import tax meant that Australian publishers “saw the need for export markets if they were to sell home productions in profitable numbers” (2013: 19, 27). A&R set up a bookstall in Australia House in London and, with colonial brashness, it appointed a salesman to travel the country direct selling to libraries and bookshops (2013: ch. 5). This upset the established conventions and A&R was obliged to operate through a British distributor (for a fee, of course!). Despite a few successes in the English market with Australian titles (cricket, war stories, popular fiction, and travel tales), it became clear that to survive as a transnational operation, A&R would need to operate as a British publisher, taking up a broad range of writers, while still trying to move the national literature into wider markets.

Australia was one of the top overseas sites for Left Book Club sales and reading groups (Neavill, 1971: 210), and Gollancz had been publishing Australian writers for some time: Jack Lindsay, Louis Esson, Kylie Tennant, George Johnston, and, via its US connections, Sumner Locke Elliott, plus some more popular genre writers for its crime list. Angus & Robertson had a cordial relationship with Gollancz, George Ferguson sending food parcels from Sydney to London in the early 1950s and picking up titles from Gollancz after initial publication in Britain — Daphne du Maurier and a collection of stories from the New Yorker being top of the list in 1952 (Angus & Robertson). ³ Later when it began its Sirius and Pacific series of Australian classics, A&R bought rights to some of Gollancz’s Australian stable. The flip side of this was that Angus & Robertson also seems to have supplied Gollancz with some works — Ernestine Hill’s My Love Must Wait, for example, came out in 1941 in Sydney and the first UK edition was with Gollancz in 1946 (AustLit, n.d.: n.p.).

In view of this exchange, it does not seem completely surprising that the Australian publisher should pick up one of Gollancz’s writers, wherever he came from. In the case of a leftist Indian publishing in Britain, the war robbed the Left Book Club of its drive to promote anti-fascism and it shut down operations in 1948 (Neavill, 1971: 212–14). In the meantime, it had been instrumental in the election of a Labour government in Britain, which had also led to successful negotiation of Indian Independence, so there was less impetus to promote Indian writers as part of British anti-colonialist politics. In any case, whereas Bhattacharya’s first novel was a denunciation of the Bengal famine, his second, Music for Mohini, dealt with India’s internal cultural splits centred on the lives of women, and was far less likely to be accepted by a publisher interested in global political affairs. The author had to find another publisher.

Bhattacharya says that he submitted the reworked manuscript of Music for Mohini (originally his first novel, but held back for edits) to an American publisher because he was working in the US at the time (Mahfil, 1968–69: 43). American reviews were good enough for a British publisher to think of taking up rights to publish it to the Commonwealth. Once Crown in New York started its own trade fiction line, it shared some authors with Gollancz, so Music for Mohini may have benefited from the author’s past connections. At the same time, Angus & Robertson was looking for new overseas material that would interest Australian readers, especially young readers, and saw America as a new source. A.G. Cousins from Angus & Robertson was talking to US publishers in 1952 and remarked to his London agent, Vera Wellings, “I am confident that they lean heavily our way.” ⁴ As part of their international outreach, by 1949 A&R had established relations with Crown, which specialized in on-selling popular titles and work that had reached its sales limits in the US. ⁵

At this time, Angus & Robertson was looking for new material that would sell in Britain but have some chance of selling in Australia as well. It began talking of a semi-independent operation in London in the late 1940s and set up its own facilities there in 1954 (Ensor, 2013: 86–7). Working out of London gave A&R inside running on the Empire’s Traditional Markets, and in 1959 it sold 500,000 books to India and published at least 23 titles from London (2013: 106, 180). The newly independent India was of topical interest, both in England and in Australia, where a small cohort of “Anglo-Indian” migrants began pushing for entrance to both England and the Anglo ex-colony, thereby testing the limits of the “White Australia” immigration policy, along with all the southern European migrants post-war (Tavan, 2005: 117–18, 121–2). There was also interest in Australian books in India. George Ferguson, working in A&R’s London office in 1958, wrote to the Sydney office to get more titles sent to the two booksellers he dealt with in Bombay. ⁶

Some combination of all the factors listed above resulted in a letter from Nagpur arriving in Sydney at the end of July 1957 to “Messrs Angus & Robertson” asking “would you be interested in publishing a novel by an Indian writer?”. Bhattacharya explained the American origins of Music for Mohini and that it had gone out of print, and presented a list of favourable clippings. ⁷ Later, he mentioned that he had had an extract published in the Australian magazine Hemisphere and was expecting one further publication in Australia. ⁸ Angus & Robertson editor Beatrice Davis asked for a copy of the novel, which took four months to arrive and then be located on the desks of A&R. Readers declared it to have “a very readable style” and the potential for “moderate sales”; it had “a certain quality of truth” in that the writer did not seem to be “putting up a show”, but there were, at the same time, lots of colourful “exotic” details of Indian life. ⁹ The book was accepted for publication at the end of January. Bhattacharya sought a deal in which copies would be sent to him for sale in India, but Davis explained that she would give the book to A&R’s London office, thereby securing Commonwealth rights for distribution. (She also in typical Anglo-Aussie fashion at the time, asked whether he couldn’t provide a shorter version of his name as Bhattacharya was a bit of a mouthful!) ¹⁰ As was the fate of many Indian English novels, in April Hector McQuarrie in London sent a copy to Graham Greene hoping for an introduction or at least a promotional quote. ¹¹ Bhattacharya was sufficiently pleased with how it all turned out to offer A&R an option on He Who Rides a Tiger when it too went out of print with Crown. ¹² This book came out in a 3000 print run, half of which went to Australia and the rest sold out in London by March of the year of release (Ensor, 2013: 108).

Bhattacharya already had a tiny presence in the Australian press in that his translation of a Tagore poem “A Glance” had appeared in the Adelaide Chronicle in 1931 under the pseudonym “Spectator”. This in itself would have attracted little attention, but Bhattacharya under his own name also published an essay, “The Twain Shall Meet” in Westerly (1957b). This Perth-based literary journal always had an Indian Ocean outlook, even before the nation as a whole rediscovered its regional location as a cultural as well as geographical reality. Bhattacharya’s piece was picked up from a conference of Asian writers in New Delhi in 1956 and it spoke out against “linguistic chauvinism” (1957b: 33), whether that manifested itself as Western disregard of non-European literatures or Indian nationalists rejecting writing in English by their compatriots. Bhattacharya also had a short story in the magazine Hemisphere (1957a) and received a mention in Mulk Raj Anand’s survey of “Modern Indian Fiction”, which appeared in the same periodical in 1959. Bilateral bridging was becoming a common ideal across the Commonwealth, and Australia enacted such a goal when it produced a landmark anthology, Span, edited by Lionel Wigmore and part produced by the Fellowship of Australian Writers in 1958. Its pioneering status in Australian literary culture is indicated by its subtitle: “An Adventure in Asian and Australian Writing”. Span contained writing from a dozen South and Southeast Asian countries, and from India included stories by Mulk Raj Anand (1958), and Bhabani Bhattacharya (1958) (both about the introduction of modern technology — hydroelectric dams and aeroplanes — to village life). Span was reviewed in The Bulletin, the literary editor for which, Douglas Stewart, knew Angus & Robertson editors and then moved to the firm himself (Stewart, 1958). Bhattacharya’s offer of his novels to A&R therefore did not come as a totally alien anomaly.

In a sense, Dorothy Blair Shimer’s referring to Angus & Robertson’s publications as “British” marked the success of the Australian company’s attempt to integrate itself into the metropolitan publishing world. But that world and its relations with its ex-colonies was still subject to division and difficulty. By 1960 the London accounts were not in great shape and there were tensions in the boardroom. ¹³ The London branch was surviving only because the company could write off some of its UK losses by sending Australian titles to London and claiming tax breaks for export industries (Ensor, 2013: 10–13, 158–61, 164–7). Not every Australian title sold in Britain, and competing with the established houses for a share of the British and American market was hard going. A&R’s promotional machinery was not at its peak, and Music for Mohini was remaindered in September 1962. A year later no stocks of either title were left and all rights reverted to the author. ¹⁴ At home there was a radical cost-cutting reorganization that only settled when the Sydney Director was ejected and a consortium of Collins, Harrap, and Heinemann took a controlling share of the company (Ensor, 2013: 107, 140). At the same time, British publishers began setting up branch offices in Australia, competing for local product (Ensor, 2013: 4, 128–9). A&R had to concentrate on its Australian list and downgrade the overseas venture. Bhattacharya writes expressing concern at news the London office was closing down, and despite his 1962 visit to Australia, when he met Beatrice Davis, A Goddess Named Gold appeared only with his American publisher. ¹⁵

This relatively brief association, produced by the late-colonial transnational machinations of one national firm, was symptomatic of a more significant change in world systems. The book Span was the end result of two developments: Australian literature had begun to take notice of its internal historical ties with India. Eve Langley’s (The Pea Pickers, 1942), an otherwise conventional “Anglo” settler tale of bush wanderlust and celebration of a new nation’s potential (apart from an original gender position), distinguished itself by its recognition of Punjabi farmers as part of the Australian scene. Angus & Robertson editor Beatrice Davis had “discovered” Langley and published her in 1942. The rather colonial Indian Tales of Ethel Anderson had appeared in 1948 and A&R had published her second collection The Little Ghosts (1959) in the same year that it put out Bhattacharya’s Music for Mohini. In 1959, too, short stories and poems by Mena Abdullah were being printed in The Bulletin (The Bulletin Index, 1930–1962). The stories about a second-generation Punjabi family in rural New South Wales would appear as a book collection, The Time of the Peacock, also published by A&R, in 1965 and were represented also in the Span collection.

Recognition of a multicultural immigrant population went hand in hand with increased awareness of overseas nations whose geographical proximity had been overshadowed by the cultural proximity of Europe to most Australians. Although the organized study of literatures in English not originating in the UK or the USA had not yet been consolidated in Australia, public interest in the Commonwealth as more than a set of political events was beginning to form. From connections via theosophy and missionary activities, Australian interest in India developed post-war as part of a Commonwealth programme of knowledge transfer called the Colombo Plan, ¹⁶ founded in 1950. Always of limited scope, it did bring South Asian students and scholars to Australia and sent professionals to the subcontinent. The shift in regional relations added to the pressure on government to abandon its White Australia Policy, although the first phase of the Colombo Plan was imaged to Australians as a paternalistic “developed” to “developing” nations aid programme. Nonetheless, it created enough awareness of Asia for a government-supported magazine, Hemisphere, to run “national geographic”-type articles and literary items from around the region and to include the work of Anand and Bhattacharya already mentioned. By 1960 the ritual journey of young Australians to Europe began to involve more than brief shipboard stopovers in Colombo and Bombay. Australian novelist Christopher Koch, for example, travelled in India in 1955, writing up his experiences in a novel Across the Sea Wall (1965) and in his collection of essays Crossing the Gap (1987).

Bhattacharya’s novels, then — while their appearance in an Australian-based imprint might look to be a mere accidental curiosity, and though the books seem not to have had major impact in their own right — appeared as part of a cultural movement and played a small part in speeding it along. In England, Angus & Robertson’s London enterprise managed to place some unremarkable advertisements in the Times Literary Supplement: mere lists of titles in which Music for Mohini and He Who Rides a Tiger were undistinguished items. ¹⁷ The only other mention in the TLS was in a later survey article on Indian writing in English by M.E. Derrett, “Why Write in English?” (Derrett, 1962). In Australia there was at least one review. The Canberra Times of 13 June 1959 included a short anonymous piece, “Novel on Indian Village Life” (Anon., 1959: 13). It began: “Authentic information about the common habits of Asian people, especially when it is provided in attractive form, is becoming increasingly welcome to Australians.” The novel is set apart from the usual colonial adventure romance genre: “Not a single Westerner throws a shadow across these pages. The book is entirely Indian”, and is valued mainly for its socio-anthropological content while appreciating the “pleasantly administered lesson in social progress” wrapped in a “charming” love story. It would be too much to claim that Bhattacharya’s novels created the taste that would produce Australian university subjects in Commonwealth literature or New Literatures in English featuring Indian writers. Nonetheless, they certainly formed part of a shift in cultural habits that broke with the limitations of dualist centre–periphery relations particular to a nationalist Anglocentric “cultural cringe”, even if the Indian novels initially appeared as part of one Australian publisher’s failed attempt to negotiate that binary.

Even so, this may all sound like a rather scholarly exercise in minor details of the past. However, the past has a habit of resurfacing, and seemingly irrelevant curiosities turn out to be part of an ongoing dynamic, unseen because they do not conform to dominant critical and cultural formations. Bhattacharya not only had a story published in the pioneering Australian collection of Asian writing, he also toured Australia, taking part in the Adelaide Festival of Arts in 1962. Also attending that Festival was Australian author, Thomas Keneally. There had already been brief but warm correspondence between Mulk Raj Anand and Keneally in which Anand exhorts the Australian to have his novels sold into India. Keneally’s agent investigates and decides that the lack of copyright security in the sub-continent made it not worth the effort. ¹⁸ Many years later, however, after the liberalizing of Indian trade and the collapse of the colonial Traditional Markets Agreement between US and British publishers, Keneally is one of a delegation of Australian writers attending the Kolkata Book Fair, and Schindler’s Ark, his Booker-winning title, is on bookshop shelves in India (Bandyopadhyay, 2011: 27). In the interim, Keneally’s interest in famine — beginning with the Irish “potato famine” and the near starvation of the first convict colony in Australia that affected his own family history, then extending to analysis of the famine in Ethiopia and war with Eritrea — led him to read up on the Bengal famine during the Second World War. His book Three Famines, on how all three famines were politically produced, cites Bhabani Bhattacharya’s So Many Hungers and He Who Rides a Tiger (Keneally, 2010: 57, 158). These many small and fleeting literary connections between India and Australia together make up a significant network operating often “under the radar” of nationalist and postcolonial critical work, but which the “transnational turn” in recent times and with it the interest in book history make more significantly visible.