The BBC’s Eastern Service and the Emergence of the Global Anglophone Novel
DANIEL RYAN MORSE
INTRODUCTION
Mulk Raj Anand’s The Big Heart (1945) is one of many novels that wrestle with the effects of foreign broadcasts in India. The antagonist, Satyapal, listens to Azad Hind radio, a station created and run by the Germans to influence Indians against the British war effort. The heroes of the novel, on the other hand, preach cooperation with the Allies and the gospels of democracy and trade unionism. This latter group of characters echo many of the propaganda points of the Eastern Service of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), no coincidence given that Anand worked there when he wrote the novel. The poet, Purun Singh Bhagat, reminds the other characters that the English are “the friends of the peoples” of Russia and China, and that the English are “on the side of truth against falsehood,” extending the BBC’s reputation for veracity to the English people generally.1 Bhagat later reflects that though he “had not done anything to provoke war, he bore some responsibility for the fact that a child in London should be mutilated by a bomb splinter,” thus internalizing British propaganda stressing that the war affected everyone throughout the empire, even if the Blitz felt remote from many in India.2 But while Satyapal listens religiously to Azad Hind, the other characters are not portrayed as BBC listeners. Instead, the novel presents the BBC worldview through the character of Bhagat—rather than include BBC broadcasts, it absorbs their messages for retransmission in a
2 INTRODUCTION
FIGURE 0.1. Mulk Raj Anand broadcasting on the BBC Eastern Service in 1942. Copyright © BBC.
print medium. In other words, the novel does not require a radio playing the BBC in the diegetic realm because one of its characters has already repurposed its messages throughout. Beyond the absorption of BBC content, however, the novel also transposes formal elements from broadcasts: Bhagat makes these arguments in a discussion staged for the novel’s readers that borrows the format of one of Anand’s radio programs. In this doubled sense, The Big Heart is a continuation of Anand’s radio work, not a break from it.3 Of course the two media forms of novel and radio coexisted, overlapping historically. Many radio commentators were also novelists (and vice versa). But over and above depicting the presence of
3 INTRODUCTION
shortwave radio in 1940s India and reworking some of its content, The Big Heart tries on a formal level to compete with it. This competition included the novel’s appropriation of shortwave broadcasting’s temporal immediacy and spatial linking (London feels close to Bhagat) as well as its polyphony (Bhagat’s concern for London is counterbalanced by characters less favorable to the British, who cite the massacre at Jallianwalla Bagh).4 Further, working in radio pushed Anand to develop an aesthetic of speed, one that tempered his interest in modernism with commitments to realism and topicality. Movements back and forth from print to broadcast, England to India, and author to reader had a distorting effect on texts, not only amplifying their upper harmonics but also shifting their fundamental tones. This more complicated process of give-and-take between shortwave broadcasting and literature is the subject of this book. Anand gave a lot of thought to the print/broadcast relationship not only in this novel but in his broadcasts as well. Interviewing the novelist Inez Holden, Anand tied her recent novel on factory life, Night Shift (1941), to a broader discussion of the relationship between politics and aesthetics, calling specifically for more working-class writing.5 In that the broadcast features an interview with a civilian turned war worker, it follows Eastern Service propaganda directives. But when Holden points out that during the war writers “have to write a manifesto, propaganda or something of this sort,” the interview is at least double-voiced: fulfilling propaganda mandates while also drawing attention to its own limitations.6 As Anand realized, the Eastern Service served as a new version of the literary periodical: it offered listeners book reviews and author biographies in addition to interviews. At the same time, the on-air periodical shifts the form. It was issued more frequently than a print periodical, was received almost instantaneously thousands of miles away, and offered cues unimaginable in print forms: the intonation, pacing, and accent of authors not least among them. To take advantage of this connection while highlighting the unique possibilities of the broadcast medium, Anand organized a multipart broadcast program explicitly modeled on the modernist little magazine. Voice, which broadcast poetry and literary criticism, also occasioned reflections on the relationship between the print and broadcast word. As the example of Anand attests—in combination with the others surveyed in the coming pages—literature and radio are subject to a significantly more complex process of negotiation than their mere facing implies. Media
4 INTRODUCTION
historians refer to this state of affairs as intermediality, pointing to the “mutual inextricability” of “print and nonprint media,” of how media forms mutually influence one another, not only in their formal qualities but also in their social use.7 Building on work in a robust but still young field, I argue that if the larger pattern of the mutual imbrication of broadcasting and literature has been underappreciated, this is especially true in the context of shortwave radio to India. This book turns to the decades of the 1930s and 1940s, when shortwave transmission was still a new technology and its use not yet settled.8 The book is drawn to these moments of transition because they reveal in sharper relief the social forces that affect the use of technology. These decades were occupied by a battle between opposing visions of British identity: from a group of loyal colonies eager to defend the motherland (as the Ministry of Information had it) to a looser network of Englishspeaking peoples seeking more equitable relations. While the technology of shortwave broadcasting was imagined as a continuation of previous cultural patterns, its extension over vast distances and interest for those seeking to reimagine British culture meant that shortwave had in the eyes of the Colonial Office at best a mixed result. Anand’s messy entanglement with the BBC’s Eastern Service is shared by many other twentieth-century writers. James Joyce, E. M. Forster, Venu Chitale, and Attia Hosain were all eager to place work with the BBC, with significant impacts on their writing, on broadcasting and its publics, and on British and Indian culture. Rarely considered together, these writers nonetheless shared microphones, studio space, and audiences. Just as significantly, they worked toward an uneasy balance between the propaganda imperatives and technical requirements of the service and their own political and aesthetic commitments. At times these writers’ interests overlapped with the service’s priorities, for instance when stressing transnational friendships. At others, the writers’ anti-imperial politics clashed with messaging on the Eastern Service. Working for the BBC provided remuneration in the austere war years as well as a means of adapting and promoting their writing over the air. But rather than take a sociological or institutional approach to these formative relations among writers at the BBC, this book engages in practices of critical bibliography in order to recover the dynamic exchanges between broadcast and print as both circulated between metropole and colony.
5 INTRODUCTION
Uncovered in this turn to the shifting sands of the literary programming on the Eastern Service is a host of experiments, only some of which were taken up in later periods and on other services. In particular, this book argues that the Eastern Service was the site of mediation in two distinct areas. On the one hand, this book traces the transposition of some of radio’s formal features into the novel: its particular structuring of polylogue in James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (1939) and its management of intimate and more capacious soundscapes in Venu Chitale’s In Transit (1950). At the same time, it also argues that this period witnesses the use of radio as an unprecedentedly fast and nearly global periodical. Diffusing discussions of literary works via shortwave radio reinforces the emergent sense that various global locations exist in the same historical present, even as economic and political unevenness persists. Building on existing accounts of the remediation of poems, plays, and short stories, I turn to the novel to show how deeply radio penetrated the literary world. On the face of it, the novel could rightly be considered the least radiogenic genre: poetry, drama, and the short story can all be broadcast in their entirety, whereas novels seldom are. Yet by limiting consideration to other genres, scholars have underappreciated the extent to which radio and literature interacted.9 While these other genres have traditionally been understood as closer to radio, it’s nonetheless true that the novel did not escape the reach of radio transmissions. Picking up these subtler waves of influence will require something like the “tolvtubular high fidelity daildialler” described in Finnegans Wake.10 The social and generic distance between radio and the novel means that their mutual impacts echo less loudly than they do in other genres. For novelists, repurposing their work for radio urged a reconsideration of form. This exchange went beyond the reuse of content to include conceptions of the sonic sphere as well as the relationship between broadcast and print. For instance, Allan Hepburn and Emily Bloom have linked the soundscapes of Elizabeth Bowen’s novels to her work in broadcasting.11 Bowen’s late novels bear radiogenic traces in their treatment of sound and in their insistence on the continued relevance of print, though one haunted by the immediacy of the broadcast medium. Whereas Bowen found broadcasting broadly congenial, writers in the 1930s were less sanguine. Through a consideration of the relationship between the sonic realm and oracular
6 INTRODUCTION
voice in three novels published in 1938 (Edward Upward’s Journey to the Border, Rex Warner’s The Professor, and C. Day Lewis’s Starting Point), Debra Rae Cohen finds that “the disturbing monoglossic power of the apparatus, seemingly impossible to ignore, rival, or subvert, thus became for leftist writers the ironic target of formal appropriation, and radio—its physicality, impact, and ideological structure—the key metaphor by which to render the problems of the contemporary situation.”12 The BBC’s efforts to create a more homogenous nation through broadcasting met a satirical response in these novels, which took up the “monoglossic” voice only to expose its politics and mock its pretensions, even as the novels themselves employed a monoglossic voice. Cohen’s essay contributes to wider efforts to bring radio to bear on more nuanced understandings of the mediascape of the modernist period, and her attention to the transposition of radiogenic qualities into the novel is a crucial starting point for the readings that follow. But this book’s focus on international broadcasting shifts the field into which the broadcasts entered. For instance, concerns about the monopoly status of the BBC are attenuated in the international context, where the BBC enjoyed a position of power but not a monopoly. Instead the BBC was forced to compete with rival (particularly German) broadcasts and a national service, All India Radio (AIR), which took a range of positions in relation to the BBC, from extensive cooperation to a disdainful tolerance.13 As a result, Anand’s deployment of radio in The Big Heart is more ambivalent than in earlier novels; radio is similarly appropriated by a leftist writer (Anand), but inserted into a crowded field its effects are drawn with greater nuance. Given this pattern of medial give-and-take, I draw in this book from the concept of a media ecology to stress the simultaneous coexistence of media forms. Rather than effect a sudden, decisive break in the discourse network, as Friedrich Kittler has it, people use new technologies like shortwave radio over time to redefine the boundaries of both older and newer media forms.14 Among other technologies whose protocols shaped the implementation of shortwave transmission was that of medium-wave, used domestically by the BBC since 1922. Raymond Williams describes this latter kind of technological coexistence, coupled with that of wider social and political context: “Virtually all technical study and experiment are undertaken within already existing social relations and cultural forms, typically for purposes that are already in general foreseen.”15 Rather than replacing medium waves, shortwaves coexisted with them for decades, helping to trouble the narrative of
7 INTRODUCTION
the forward march of technology. The same can be said of the novel. If media scholars lean too hard on the Darwinian connotations of media ecology, as a struggle for survival in which newer media attempt to kill off their predecessors, they are liable to miss how “in many cases apparently competing media may strengthen or reinforce one another.”16 Bertolt Brecht, for instance, complained in the 1930s that radio was merely parasitic on preexisting media forms. To survive, a parasite must keep its host alive. Brecht is correct to observe that radio is imitative, but as his metaphor implies, radio fails to completely overlap with or displace existing forms. In fact, far from killing them off, it could paradoxically popularize them and also highlight some of their unique qualities. As Brecht’s complaint suggests, newer media like radio often “refashion older media,” but at the same time, “older media refashion themselves to answer the challenges of new media.”17 This process, what Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin call remediation, is a useful way to understand the processes undergirding the state of intermediality. Bolter and Grusin focus on digital “new media,” arguing for a teleological account of media development and succumbing to a level of media determinism that I avoid in this book. But their account of the twin logics of immediacy and hypermediacy central to remediation is one that I adopt here: “If the logic of immediacy leads one either to erase or to render automatic the act of representation, the logic of hypermediacy acknowledges multiple acts of representation and makes them visible.”18 In other words, even as BBC sound engineers strove for an air of immediacy, attempting to aid listeners in forgetting that they were listening to a radio, broadcasters like E. M. Forster often called attention to the fact that they were speaking into a microphone, ostensibly dismantling the air of transparency. Further, Forster in particular broadcast primarily about books; even when he did not call attention to his location in a studio, he described one medium (print) over another (broadcast), thus making audible “multiple acts of representation.” That many of these broadcasts about books were then reprinted in the Listener and his own books continues this process of negotiating immediacy and hypermediacy. Hypermediacy, a demonstration of medial self-consciousness, is characteristic of modernism, though by no means limited to it. The “thoughtfulness, reflection, and self-examination” following on the introduction of new media, David Thorburn and Henry Jenkins argue, take “the form of a reassessment of established media forms, whose basic elements may now
8 INTRODUCTION
achieve a new visibility.”19 This latter point is vital to what I argue in this book: not only does the novel find its way on to the radio, but in its very adaptation certain long-standing features protrude like never before. The novel does not become radio. In its length, its materiality, its investment in the bourgeois individual over society at large, the novel is not entirely susceptible to remediation, thus ensuring its continued existence. Applying this insight to modernist literature, Julian Murphet argues for a “dialectic of convergence-differentiation,” a model that would simultaneously recognize that “literature ‘intelligently and opportunistically’ poaches technical and material properties from [o]ther arts” (and vice versa), while simultaneously “the imperative of autonomization” leads “increasingly to an adamant insistence” on medium specificity.20 Even as radio and print rob each other’s formal qualities, the elements resistant to this pilfering visibly calcify. Finnegans Wake incorporates radio terms and a radiogenic form, but it simultaneously calls attention to itself as a book. Given this focused interest, my use of the concept of “media convergence” differs from that often deployed in the study of digital media (for instance, the combination of newspaper, television, and internet on a smartphone) as well as in institutional analyses attuned to increasing “industry conglomeration and concentration,” or the blurring of lines “between previously separate business activities.”21 Over and above “the flow of content across multiple media platforms,” in this book I use media convergence to point to a necessarily incomplete borrowing of content, formal features, and social contexts from one medium to another.22 For the writers surveyed in this book, radio’s staging of the temporal relationship between metropole and colony inspires a renewed claim to historical contemporaneity, while its formal features suggest a way to render the relationship between individual and society through management of the soundscape. While much of this book explores writers’ enchantment with the broadcast medium and their various attempts to transpose radiogenic elements into the novel, I also uncover how the career of Attia Hosain, who left broadcasting to turn to the novel, underscores the simultaneous force of media differentiation. Even as Hosain used her position as a broadcaster to discuss some of the issues she faced in attempting to translate Indian experiences into an English novel, she also increasingly threw her lot in with the novel precisely because of its longer history detailing the “process of the problematic individual’s journeying towards” herself.23
9 INTRODUCTION
To recover the vestiges of these flows and blockages, this book draws on methods and insights from bibliography and periodical studies. Using these tools, we can better appreciate how these texts morphed over time, whether in the course of their initial writing (as in Joyce and Chitale) or in their various public appearances (as in Hosain, Forster, and Anand). In addition to avant-textes (an author’s preprint materials, which I consider most extensively in the case of James Joyce), this book broadly examines paratextual elements, those items that in Gérard Genette’s formulation “surround” and “extend” the text.24 The epitext, for instance, comprises elements like reviews or author interviews—forms that affect a text’s reception but that are not physically bound with a text.25 Yet at any moment epitext could become paratext: interviews might be appended to scholarly editions of works, for instance, and hearing an author interview influences a reader’s interpretation. While I therefore investigate broadcast and print texts throughout this book, I also seek to expand our account of how shortwave radio alters “the ways and means of the paratext,” which “change continually, depending on period, culture, genre, author, work, and edition.”26 The movement of texts into and out of the broadcast medium has an impact on all these considerations, framing our understanding of remediation. The expanded sense of the text proposed by Genette maps onto (without entirely overlapping with) periodical studies and book history, two of the influential means of historicizing modernism. Periodical studies shares the interest in multiple presentations of texts, authors, interviews, and so on but grounds this study in the scrutiny of the physical coordinates of the page and the creation and distribution networks of periodicals. The physical coordinates of the page—what Jerome McGann calls “bibliographic codes”—clearly do not translate over the air.27 Yet analysis along these lines has been central to the scholarship on modernist periodicals. In an influential reading, David Bennett proposes that “the experience of discontinuity which typifies periodical reading” is precisely that demanded by modernist texts, which users read “not from cover to cover, but ‘spatially,’ affirming the same freedom to dip in, to skip, to cross-refer—unconstrained by the logic of temporal succession—that the reader of the magazine enjoys.”28 Taking the spatial metaphor to further heights, Suzanne Churchill reads the little magazine Others by the lights of its “spatial and architectural tropes.”29 The intangibility of the broadcast medium, however, suggests a way to soften the initially hard distinction between spatial and
10 INTRODUCTION
temporal form. In this book I attend more carefully to the temporal sequence of the broadcast periodical, which—pace Bennett—still allows for listeners to “dip in, to skip, to cross-refer,” and thus one way to expand the archive and reinvigorate the study of modernist periodicals. If the physical coordinates of the page are lost in the remediation of the periodical, many of what Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker refer to as “periodical codes” survive intact: “periodicity of publication . . . networks of distribution and sales, modes of financial support, payment practices towards contributors, editorial arrangements,” and “type of material published.”30 As this list begins to indicate, while periodical studies has coexisted with modernist studies for some time now, attention to “bibliographic codes” alone has far from exhausted the field. A recent instantiation focused on “networks of distribution” speaks centrally to the concerns of this book. Extending earlier work by Robert Scholes, Mark Morrisson, and Donal Harris, Eric Bulson brings the transnational turn to bear on periodicals. For Bulson, not only did little magazines carry “texts safely into the port of the Western canon,” together they also “worked within and against an emerging literary network that was truly global in scope and scale.” In attending to the form of the little magazine itself, over and against its modernist content, Bulson provides a model for the global connections between writers and readers, but, just as important, one that does not form a global totality or world magazine no matter what its aspirations: “The medium was too bound up with local, regional, and national contexts and print cultures, which were, in turn, defined within and against international and transnational processes.”31 Rather than read Eastern Service programs like Voice or E. M. Forster’s book reviews as global forms, I attend to the historical and geographic contexts in which they appeared. The Eastern Service contributed to what we now call the global Anglophone novel, but it did so in a network of imperial communications. But whereas Bulson derives his sense of media specificity by focusing on print (with the notable exception of a chapter on F. T. Marinetti’s use of wireless), I here follow media studies in more extensively tracing the process of remediation, particularly the use of print to respond in some ways to the challenges posed by the use of radio. More so than Philip Gaskell, who shares Bulson’s focus on material texts, I follow D. F. McKenzie’s call for a “sociology of texts,” one that in tracing “all forms of texts, not merely books,” expands the remit of critical bibliography to consider audio.32 Even
11 INTRODUCTION
under the broader umbrella of the sociology of texts, however, the supposed immateriality of radio has stalled the necessary conversation between radio studies and book history. The unusually literary nature of the Eastern Service, to which I turn now, provides an opening into what I hope will be a longer and deeper investigation into shortwave’s role in the circulation of texts. THE EASTERN SERVICE
The Eastern Service began humbly, broadcasting a ten-minute daily news update in Hindustani starting on May 11, 1940, and adding English programs shortly thereafter. Both the personnel and programming were significantly beefed up during the war, and quickly. Supplementing the earlier English-language Empire Service, which started officially on December 19, 1932 (and which I discuss in more detail in chapter 1), the BBC expanded foreign-language offerings in order to counter fascist broadcasts: the Arabic Service on January 3, 1938, Latin American Service in March 1938, and the Eastern Service in 1940.33 From 103 staff members in 1939, the overseas services employed 1,472 in 1941; the total BBC staff topped 10,000 by December 1941.34 Paralleling the rise in staff were the number of languages offered; the Eastern Service added Tamil in May 1941, Bengali in October 1941, Marathi and Gujarati in March 1942, and Sinhalese by spring 1943 to the longer-standing English and Hindustani transmissions.35 Though the BBC did not broadcast programs to India until 1940, controlling broadcasting there was long a dream of John Reith, the BBC’s first director-general, who considered going himself to set it up. Instead, Reith sent Lionel Fielden, who had worked under Hilda Matheson in the early instantiation of the Talks Department. Fielden passed the Reithian vision onto All India Radio (AIR), as well as the aesthetic of the talk genre as developed by Matheson (though to Reith’s consternation the BBC never took control of AIR’s programming).36 Faced with hundreds of candidates for jobs at AIR, the newly arrived Fielden heeded the advice of his friend E. M. Forster and hired Ahmed S. Bokhari, who had studied at Cambridge and taught English literature at Government College, Lahore. Bokhari went on to replace Fielden during the war, serving as director-general of AIR in Delhi from 1939 to 1947.37 As the Forster connection implies, Fielden was never the prototypical imperialist: he counted the Congress leaders
12 INTRODUCTION
Gandhi, Nehru, and Sarojini Naidu as friends and—though on excellent terms with the viceroy—snubbed the vast majority of the British administrators in India.38 While still in India, Fielden advised the BBC that the Empire Service should stop replaying bland programming from the Home Service and instead “concentrate on giving the world the best of England’s writers, poets, musicians, engineers, actors, playwrights, philosophers, etc. This surely is the best propaganda that any nation could do for itself.”39 This vision of the Empire Service was crucial to the formation of the Eastern Service, as was Fielden himself. When it was clear that the BBC should address India directly, following the declaration of war and the creation of a German propaganda service in Indian languages, the viceroy asked Fielden whether he would “go to organize it.”40 The BBC, however, wanted Sir Malcolm Darling, so Fielden agreed to join as editor under Darling. Zulfiqar Ali Bokhari, director of the Delhi AIR station and Ahmed Bokhari’s brother, was also hired by the BBC, taking up the new post of program organizer and living with Fielden in London throughout the war.41 Fielden quit after only a few months, discouraged that his “rude and lively” programming was overturned in favor of Darling’s vision of a “courteous and non-committal” service.42 Although Darling fought against Bokhari gaining any power when Fielden left, ultimately Darling was put in charge of Hindustani broadcasts, leaving Bokhari in charge of the English ones.43 Both soon worked under Eastern Service director L. F. Rushbrook Williams, appointed September 29, 1941, who came to the BBC from the Ministry of Information (MOI) and before that was a history professor in India.44 Much of the staffing tumult in the early days settled as the war went on, but the key outcome was that an Indian was in charge of English-language programming on the Eastern Service, and that Bokhari continued the high cultural vision of the early Talks Department under Matheson and Fielden. Given wartime restrictions, the Eastern Service was subject to various levels of censorship. Rushbrook Williams, in charge of ensuring compliance with the MOI, met with representatives from the MOI, the India Office, and the School of Oriental Studies every other week; the government of India sent cables just as frequently, maintaining “a constant stream of suggestion, criticism and advice.” 45 To be safe, all programs were scripted in advance and checked by Bokhari for compliance. In addition, “there was a ‘censor key’ in every studio suite, and a censor was present at every transmission,
13 INTRODUCTION
though the occasions on which he used his key seem to have been extremely rare.” 46 In fact, as Asa Briggs claims: “Although the Ministry of Information had an Empire Division and was expected to maintain close liaison with the BBC, particularly with the Empire News Editor, the Ministry exercised far less control over Empire broadcasting than over broadcasts to Europe.” 47 The censorship at the Eastern Service was predominantly selfcensorship: contributors stuck to general propaganda guidelines, and compliance was checked internally by Bokhari rather than by the MOI. The government of India urged the creation of BBC broadcasts to India in part because German broadcasts offered a mix of cultural programming and nationalist invective, but also because Indians were felt to be indifferent to the war. One memo to the BBC explained that “Indian opinion is not altogether sure of the grim necessity of the war, and a considerable section of it has doubts about its justice.”48 Reporting from India, Laurence Brander made it clear that listeners there sought “solid British cultural fare”: It was the best antidote to the German tactics of broadcasting high-quality classical music with the aim of giving the lie to the claims that the Nazis were uncivilized barbarians. The Germans, it was said, had some success in this way; listeners had been switching over to Zeesen after the BBC news, and German propaganda to India had been making much of the low cultural level of broadcasting expected by the average British listener in India. The special English programme to India amounting to forty-five minutes a day and produced by Bokhari under the Eastern Service Director, Professor Rushbrook Williams, offered the obvious outlet for what Brander called “the very best all-English product,” “sensible, cultivated, gracious and interesting.” 49
Bokhari argued successfully that the only hope for propaganda to India was if it was subtle, leftist in character, and delivered by writers known to be sympathetic to the anti-imperialist movement.50 George Orwell, who was hired to assist Bokhari in 1941, explains: “Most of our broadcasters are Indian left-wing intellectuals, from Liberals to Trotskyists, some of them bitterly anti-British. They don’t do it to ‘fox the Indian masses’ but because they know what a Fascist victory would mean to the chances of India’s independence.”51 As I unfold in more detail in the following chapters, these broadcasters walked a difficult line, sure of the antifascist cause but far less sanguine about Britain’s past and future treatment of India.
Initially created to counteract broadcasts from Nazi Germany, the BBC’s Eastern Service became a cauldron of global modernism and an unlikely nexus of artistic exchange. In Radio Empire, Daniel Ryan Morse reveals the significance of the Eastern Service for global Anglophone literature and literary broadcasting. Adding a transnational perspective to scholarship on radio modernism, Morse demonstrates how the history of broadcasting outside of Western Europe offers a new understanding of the relationship between colonial center and periphery. “Packed with rich findings, this fascinating study offers invaluable new insights into the far-reaching impact of the BBC’s Eastern Service as laboratory for the evolution of a global and transnational vision of modernity, a vision still reverberating across cultural, literary, and media studies today.” —SUSHEILA NASTA, COEDITOR OF THE CAMBRIDGE HISTORY OF BLACK AND ASIAN BRITISH WRITING
“With archival surprises and deft close readings, Radio Empire shows how the BBC’s Eastern Service influenced the development of Anglophone fiction. Including treatments of canonical figures such as E. M. Forster and Mulk Raj Anand, as well as important but understudied novelists such as Venu Chitale and Attia Hosain, Morse reveals how the technical constraints and possibilities of radio broadcasting impacted the formal conventions of English-language writing. It is an exciting contribution to colonial and postcolonial literary studies.” —PETER KALLINEY, AUTHOR OF MODERNISM IN A GLOBAL CONTEXT
“With his searching examination of the role of the BBC’s Eastern Service in the development of the global Anglophone novel, Morse fills an important gap in literary radio studies. Wedding the insights of postcolonial studies and media theory, Radio Empire capably establishes the salience of transnational and intermedial exchange to the literary history of the mid-twentieth century.” —DEBRA RAE COHEN, COEDITOR OF BROADCASTING MODERNISM
DANIEL RYAN MORSE
is Fitzgerald Distinguished Professor
of the Humanities and assistant professor of English at the University of Nevada, Reno.
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS / NEW YORK cup.columbia.edu Cover design: Noah Arlow Cover image: © BBC
Printed in the U.S.A.