India Arrived: Seeing and Being in Britain, 1870-1914 - an examination of the definitive phases and key moments of early Indian migration to Britain

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The book project 'India Arrived: Seeing and Being in Britain, 1870-1914', will trace a themed and structured cultural and literary history of the first distinct phase of significant Indian migration to Britain, 1870-1914. To date, this early phase of South Asian diaspora has not been shaped into a phased monograph-length narrative, such as that proposed. The period is bracketed by the opening of the Suez Canal, and the relaxing of certain caste restrictions on Indians' travel at its one end, and by the outbreak of the First World War at its other, when, following the massive but controversial involvement of 1.5 million Indians in the War effort, Indian-British relations markedly changed in the direction of greater divisiveness and nationalist politicization. Building on and expanding the extensive, pathbreaking archival research carried out as part of the 2007-10 AHRC-funded 'Making Britain' project, not yet consolidated in monograph form, the book's narrative of the formation of Britain's first diasporic communities, and of the unfolding of the first India-British literary and cross-cultural collaborations, will be organized under five keynote headings capturing definitive aspects of the five decades in question, and rounding off with a coda and conclusion: Gateway Suez; London Under Indian Eyes; Oriental Fin de Siecle; Edwardian Extremists; 1912; Coda: The Indian Salient.The monograph will contend that the early 1870-1914 period was distinguished in particular by friendships and acts of hospitality operating in both directions between the cultures, on British soil, expressed as one-on-one exchanges between Indian and British individuals (Dadabhai Naoroji and his British hosts, Manmohan Ghose and Laurence Binyon, Sarojini Naidu and 1890s poets around Yeats, Margaret Noble and Ananda Coomaraswamy, Rothenstein and Tagore), and within groups such as the National Indian Association, the Theosophical Society, and the India Society which comprised both Indian and British members. It was also characterized by a frank and unabashed approach among the Indian travel writers, intellectuals, essayists and poets towards British culture and society, facilitated through new networks of trade and commerce, and religious and cultural interchange between India and Britain. From the British point of view, exchanges were animated also by a palpable, to date critically neglected British interest in India as providing new modes of knowledge, concepts of 'truth' and conventions of figuration at a time of intensive late Victorian and modernist self-questioning (so, for example, Ghose and Naidu found in the mannered, highly patterned poetics of decadence a way of insinuating their own distinctive, sinuous 'Oriental line', and William Rothenstein's explorations in Indian culture coincided with Roger Fry's First and Second Post-Impressionist Exhibitions, 1910, 1912). The study will ask whether the cosmopolitan vision of these writers and intellectuals anticipated the development of migrant South Asian and multicultural identities in Britain later in the twentieth century; and, finally, whether the fact that Indian troops held the Ypres salient on behalf of the Allies in 1914-15 can be cast as one of the most decisive and unequivocal ways in which Indians supported and interacted with Britain at this time. Gathering together the significant work in terms of new research and intensive academic and public outreach carried out by 'Making Britain' (including workshops, a massive data base, and a source book covering the entire 1870-1950 span), 'India Arrived, 1870-1914' will consolidate these findings into a structured narrative tracing the early coming-into-being of one of contemporary Britain's most prominent and influential migrant communities. Rather than surveying the wide field, the book will offer an informed and focused critical analysis of British-Indian interaction and its varied and distinctive literary-cultural impacts in a 45-year period.