Reading Woolf in India

‘Filamentary relations’: Virginia Woolf and India

“…Woolf's filamentary relations, whether she functions in them as agent or object, extended through Mulk Raj Anand to the internationalism of the Indian Progressive Writers' Association (IPWA). As I have noted elsewhere, ‘the Progressive Movement, a formative influence on Urdu and Hindi, as well as other north Indian literatures from the 1930s onward, is one of many examples of modernism's global journeys’ (Chaudhuri, 2016, p. 458; also 457–60). Inaugurated in 1932 with the publication in Lucknow of Angarey (‘Embers’, a collection of nine Urdu short stories and a play that was immediately banned by the provincial government), its first meeting in exile was held in a back room of the Nanking restaurant in Bloomsbury on 24 November 1934, with Sajjad Zaheer and Anand himself in attendance.…”

“…Anand, using high modernist narrative modes to record ‘reminiscence, instinctive awareness and intuition’ in subaltern subjects (Anand, 1972, p. 21; 1947, pp. 28–29), can be seen as writing back to Woolf ‘from an India that would have repelled her’ (Chaudhuri, 2016, p. 457). For young writers in the colonies, the Joycean ‘language of the night’ (Anand, 2011a, p. 202), or Woolf's rendering of consciousness, offered possible solutions to a crisis of representation.…”

“…Of crucial importance is Woolf's near‐total absence from the literature of early feminist movements in India, or the wider campaigns for women's education, rights and personal and political freedoms that had begun in the 19th century. The threads (Woolf's ‘minute filaments’) that extend outwards from books within the networks of modernist print culture establish no more than a tenuous link between two Hogarth Press publications for 1929: Woolf's A Room of One's Own, and A Woman of India, the biography of a female social activist by her husband, the Indian colonial official Gurusaday Dutt (see Dutt, 1929, and Chaudhuri, 2016, p. 456).…”

“…Instead of pursuing a strictly linear history, recent commentators have drawn attention to the emergence in 19th century India of women writers who seem to anticipate Woolf's imaginings, especially the fantasy of ‘Shakespeare's sister’ that Woolf proposed in A Room of One's Own : that is, the woman writer of genius who is denied education and opportunity. Among Indian women cited in this context are the self‐taught life‐writer Rasasundari Dasi (Chaudhuri, 2016, p. 453), the poet Rabindranath Tagore's elder sister Swarnakumari (Friedman, 2015a, pp. 274–278, 2015b, pp.…”