Introducing Mulk Raj Anand: the colonial politics of collaboration

Abstract

Collaboration is often understood as central to modernist literary production. The recent turn to a transnational or globalised understanding of modernism has made attention to collaborations across races and cultures all the more pressing. This article attends to the colonial politics of collaboration by exploring a specific instance of a particular genre: the introductions written by white, male, metropolitan modernists to texts by colonial authors. Focusing initially on introductions by Ford Madox Ford, Arthur Symons, Edmund Gosse and W. B. Yeats to texts by Jean Rhys, Sarojini Naidu and Rabindranath Tagore, the article then looks in detail at the prefaces written by E. M. Forster and Leonard Woolf to writing by Mulk Raj Anand (Untouchable, 1935 and Letters on India, 1942). By putting pressure on the term ‘collaboration’ itself – and the frequent slippage to ‘collaborationist’ in relation to scholarship on Anand – this article will investigate the oft-overlooked genre of the introduction to ask questions crucial to the wider study of global modernisms. It will tease out the complex relationships, networks and publishing histories signalled by this conjunction of introduction and text. These prefatory texts are marked by imperial gestures of cultural patronage, framing and mediation but are also the very place where these gestures and hierarchies are contested and overturned.