‘A Cracked Sheet-Glass Mirror’: Conditions of Collaboration at the 1945 P.E.N. All-India Writers’ Conference

Introduction

‘[T]he West is in colossal ignorance of Indian life and literature.’ ¹ With these words, uttered at the first P.E.N. All-India Writers’ Conference in Jaipur in 1945, Dr Md. Shahidullah got to the heart of why, historically, the international organisation of Poets, Essayists, Novelists (P.E.N.) was hard-pressed to remain apolitical in its identity. Although P.E.N. emerged ostensibly to foster mutual exchange among writers internationally, mutuality was compromised under political conditions of imperialism hinging on hierarchal notions of culture. Founded as a dinner club in London in 1921, P.E.N. was a product of postwar liberal optimism regarding the unifying potential of literary fellowship to transcend the contingencies and unrest of international politics. Much has been written about how P.E.N. shed its apolitics with the onset of fascism in the lead-up to World War II (WWII), as liberal members felt compelled to resist totalitarianism. ² Less scholarly attention has been paid to how imperialism and nationalist decolonisation movements figured in the history of P.E.N.’s politicisation.

For this special issue on modernism and collaboration, P.E.N. is an apt case study to examine how an organisation born in imperial Britain endeavoured in some cases and floundered in others to create conditions for collaboration between Indian and British writers. While ostensibly arranged for simple social exchange among writers, P.E.N. dinners served the implicit purpose of fostering professional networks to result in edited collections, literary journals and other collaborative writing and publishing undertakings. Yet P.E.N. was also an inherently collaborative endeavour in that it sought to establish a universal definition of the relationship between literature and progressivism. As I discuss in the pages to follow, many Indian writers were willing to engage in this collaborative definitional effort, but not on terms of imperial hierarchy – they wanted a definition to account for Indian cultural and political autonomy.

The intersection of literature with politics was a flashpoint for writers across the empire during this chapter of P.E.N. history. P.E.N. emerged from the administrative hub of the empire, but it invited participation from writers the world over, including in many colonial locales. In addition to arranging meals, receptions and other social events in London to welcome international writers, P.E.N. organised international congresses in such locales as Berlin, Dubrovnik and Buenos Aires. In 1945, the P.E.N. All-India Writers’ Conference – highlighted in this essay – brought writers together from across India as well as influential British attendees. In the broadest sense, P.E.N. was a forum for collaboration among writers internationally not only to develop writing and editing projects together but also to forge a unifying conception of literature for the modern era. I look to the P.E.N. archives at the Harry Ransom Center (HRC) (Figure 1) to examine exchanges among and between Indian and British writers in P.E.N.’s orbit during the WWII era and leading up to the Indian Independence Act of 1947. What do these materials – ranging from correspondence to periodical writings to P.E.N. institutional records and ephemera – reveal about debate, dissent and points of agreement among and between Indian and white British writers interested in the relationship between literature and progressivism during the WWII era? OPEN IN VIEWER

Key metropolitan figures such as Sophia Wadia, co-founder of the P.E.N. All-India Centre, Herman Ould, P.E.N. International Secretary, and writers affiliated with the London-based periodical Indian Writing show how the question of the ‘right’ relationship between literature and politics – that is, whether literature should transcend or transform international politics – galvanised P.E.N. advocates and sceptics alike during the interwar period. This question circulated during the lead-up to WWII, developed during the war as matters of Indian military engagement and burgeoning nationalism came to the fore and culminated at the 1945 P.E.N. All-India Writers’ Conference at which Shahidullah and many other speakers denounced British ignorance of colonial people, cultures and affairs. Where British writers demonstrated or conceded ignorance of colonial contexts, many Indian writers pointed out that the logic of imperialism depends on such ignorance. Therefore, I pay particular attention to how the politics of ignorance and insularity catalysed Indian writers’ articulation of the necessary conditions for cross-imperial collaboration.

Collaboration is one paradigm that scholars in modernist studies can use to understand how intellectuals oriented themselves to each other across power differentials generated by imperialism. Scholars such as Leela Gandhi, Shun Yin Kiang, Anindyo Roy, John Marx, Gil Gott and Samuel Moyn show that for cross-imperial intellectual exchange, the paradigms of friendship, ³ civility ⁴ and humanitarianism ⁵ fell short or even actively reinforced the social hierarchies demanded by imperialism. As evidenced by the essays in this special issue, collaboration represents yet another avenue for cross-imperial exchange – stories of writers across the empire collaborating with each other on intellectual endeavours in editing and publishing are our best hope for insight into how values of equality were practised by writers under conditions of imperialism. However, like friendship, civility and humanitarianism, collaboration is an ideal; individuals who pursued it in the context of P.E.N. did not always achieve its promise.

To understand the early history of P.E.N. as instructive about the necessary conditions of collaboration in the face of power, the concept of mutuality as defined by the contemporary oral historian Alessandro Portelli is useful. Although published decades after the 1945 P.E.N. All-India Writers’ Conference, Portelli’s premise that ‘[e]quality … cannot be wished into being’ ⁶ was the subtext of many critical Indian writers’ remarks at the conference regarding white British readers and writers. Portelli’s meditation on the idea that ‘two interacting subjects cannot act together unless some kind of mutuality is established’ ⁷ has direct implications for this history of writers in British and Indian P.E.N. Indian writers were vocally concerned about British ignorance of South Asian people, politics and cultures, and Portelli’s theory articulates the precise stakes of such ignorance. Collaboration requires ‘an exchange between two subjects: literally a mutual sighting. One party cannot really see the other unless the other can see him or her in turn.’ ⁸ From this perspective, Shahidullah’s pronouncement about the ‘colossal’ nature of Anglo-European ignorance becomes a referendum on the capacity of British intellectuals to collaborate with South Asian colleagues on a definition of the relationship between literature and progressivism.

To be sure, political conditions under imperialism categorically obstructed equality. Plans for the P.E.N. All-India Writers’ Conference took place in the wake of the 1942 ‘Quit India’ movement. Initiated by Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi and authorised by the All India Congress Committee, the movement called for the withdrawal of British rule. Although anchored in principles of non-violence, the movement was aggressively suppressed by British colonial authorities. The mass detention of demonstrators across India, in addition to the arrests of Gandhi and Congress members, temporarily subdued the movement, but ultimately united people across India in resistance to empire. ⁹ India would achieve Independence in August of 1947. Staggering numbers of people lost their lives in protests precipitating independence and during the unrest accompanying independence and partition. ¹⁰ The impacts of the suppression and violence resonated across the empire, necessarily influencing personal and political dynamics among South Asian and British subjects of empire in India and England alike. In this context, it comes as no surprise that P.E.N.’s attempts to forge pathways of exchange among writers internationally were met with scepticism or disinterest by many Indian writers. Yet a number of influential Indian writers, educated metropolitan elites based both in India and England, were willing to engage (in some cases cautiously and often critically) with the P.E.N. prototype of intellectual exchange in the name of progressivism. What emerges from a study of their writings and letters is a sense that collaboration across borders on an understanding of the ideological role of literature in the modern era is a widely shared value, but that the terms of collaboration must be negotiated to account for Indian autonomy.

P.E.N.’s Early Mission and Identity

To grasp the political implications of the shared vision for collaboration that metropolitan Indian intellectuals at the P.E.N. All-India Writers’ Conference sought to cultivate, it is important to understand that the Jaipur conference represented a divergence from P.E.N.’s original mission. Founded in London in 1921 by poet, playwright and novelist Catherine Amy Dawson-Scott, with the fiction writer John Galsworthy appointed as president from 1921–33, P.E.N. was originally instituted as a dinner club where, according to an early statement on membership criteria, ‘well-known writers … can meet’ and ‘visitors from abroad can hope to find them’. ¹¹ Hosting lavish dinners and ‘Book Balls’ complete with prize drawings and costume competitions, P.E.N. intentionally eschewed political engagement in favour of social opportunities (Figure 2). The logic behind this strategy is detailed in a speech by Galsworthy documented in a 1927 P.E.N. newsletter. Galsworthy cited a resolution passed by P.E.N. leadership to discourage the intersection of literature with politics:

Literature, national though it be in origin, knows no frontiers, and should remain common currency between nations in spite of political and international upheavals. In all circumstances … works of art, the patrimony of humanity at large, should be left untouched by national or political passion. ¹² OPEN IN VIEWER

Yet as R. A. Wilford points out in his study of early P.E.N., this investment in ‘the bridge-building capacity of literature and in the ability of writers to act as the liberal conscience of mankind’ ¹³ was ‘inevitably political, particularly during the later years of the 1930s as international tensions increased’. ¹⁴ Wilford and other scholars have detailed how the rise of fascism compelled P.E.N. to develop a position defending civil liberties against the rise of totalitarianism. Liam Gearon dates the politicisation of P.E.N. to 1933, when H. G. Wells was appointed President at the 11th P.E.N. Congress in Dubrovnik ¹⁵ and confronted head-on what were emerging as the ‘unavoidable political realities’ of censorship, repression and imprisonment of writers in Germany and Austria. ¹⁶ This catalysed the organisation’s transition from the ‘friendly cosmopolitanism of its early years’ to its advocacy of ‘an author’s human rights … against totalitarian states’. ¹⁷ At this juncture, then, it was clearly not a tenable proposition for literature to advance progressive values yet remain ‘untouched by politics’. But the precise dimensions of P.E.N.’s institutional position on the relationship between literature and politics remained to be determined.

P.E.N.’s Efforts to Appeal to Indian Writers

The first major challenge to P.E.N.’s apolitical stance came in the form of European fascism. But with this challenge came an opportunity to build a more collaborative conception of the relationship between literature and politics – a conception perhaps more attuned to the national and cultural autonomy of hitherto colonised states. When it came to fascism, the stakes for many British P.E.N members were clear. As Wilford writes, for P.E.N.,

the war was an open and shut case—a conflict between the forces of democracy and the forces of fascism, between those who championed traditional freedoms and those who suppressed them. ¹⁸

While British P.E.N. made a concerted effort to appeal to young Indian writers, it had trouble doing so on account of its distancing, on principle, of literature from politics. Early P.E.N. administrators such as Galsworthy and Ould reached out to a wide spectrum of literary communities, with mixed results. While the P.E.N. archives at the HRC hold membership records that evidence an impressive range of influence, evidence of writers who declined participation is also telling. In 1935, for instance, Ould wrote to E. M. Forster that the P.E.N. presidency had been offered to Virginia Woolf. ²⁰ Woolf declined the honour, possibly as part of a ‘Bloomsbury boycott’ of P.E.N., on grounds of a perception documented by historian Megan Doherty that P.E.N. ‘tended to embrace linear narrative styles and engag[e] little with modernism or other avant-garde currents of the day’. ²¹ Ould also reached out to John Lehmann, founder and editor of the leftist periodical series New Writing, which ran under various imprints (including the Woolfs’ Hogarth Press) from 1936–50. Lehmann’s connections as a renowned publisher of Popular Front and working-class documentary realist literature made him an attractive prospective liaison to England’s young writers. Yet as evidenced by correspondence between Ould and Lehmann, P.E.N. continually failed to attract young leftists to its ranks. ²²

Early P.E.N. was thus identified as much by those who demurred as it was by those who embraced the organisation. If Bloomsbury and young working-class British writers were lukewarm on P.E.N., young leftist Indian writers in England were especially wary of the organisation. By all accounts, Ould was interested in connecting with Indian writers – whether out of genuine interest in South Asian literary perspectives, to round out publication and membership records, or perhaps both. Yet at its founding in 1921, P.E.N. was an inherently exclusive organisation. Its membership criteria, documented in draft form in the HRC collection, were as follows:

The qualifications for membership are: -A book of verse published by a well known Continental London or American firm. A play produced by any wellknown [sic] theatre. The editorship past or present of a well-known paper or magazine. A novel published by a wellknown London or American firm or Continental. ²³

As the organisation matured over the course of the 1930s and 40s and P.E.N. leaders made an effort to connect with young, international writers based in England, P.E.N.’s political orientation alienated Indian writers associated with Indian Writing and the London-based All-India Progressive Writers’ Association. ²⁵ These institutions shared key members and contributors (including Mulk Raj Anand and Ahmed Ali) who were targets for P.E.N. recruitment. Ould wrote to E. M. Forster on April 3, 1941,

I have been turning over in my mind the possibility of having a P.E.N. lunch or reception in honour of Indian literature. I think it would probably serve a useful purpose at the present moment. If it could be arranged would it be possible for your [sic] to preside or in some other way take a prominent part in the proceedings? ²⁶

Nevertheless, a month after his initial query, Ould wrote again to Forster about the possibility of a P.E.N. event focused on Indian writing.

I think some time I will try to get in touch with the Indian Writing group and see if an informal party of some kind could be arranged—something quite unofficial. I am loath to give up the idea of getting together, but at the back of my mind there is a fear that our own Centre in India may not be in the good books of the young Indian writers over here. ³⁰

Indian Writers Respond to P.E.N.

To understand this as-yet-speculative conception of a relationship between literature and politics that recognises mutuality as a condition of fruitful collaboration, it is helpful to survey responses to P.E.N. from a spectrum of politically engaged Indian writing in English (Figure 3). To start, it is clear that P.E.N. at large was not in the ‘good books’ of members of the All-India Progressive Writers’ Association reflected in the editorial board of Indian Writing. The board of the journal included Iqbal Singh, Ahmed Ali, K. S. Shelvankar and A. Subramaniam; their editorial in the Summer 1940 issue of Indian Writing skewers P.E.N. as representing the distastefully oblivious position the editors perceive as common among British liberals that one can maintain one’s own position of privilege while advocating sweeping solutions to global conflict. At the onset of WWII, they write,

fantasy-mongering is becoming increasingly popular. The panacea industry is flourishing. Bloomsbury agnostics in their newly discovered piety pray for ‘God Control’ and ‘Moral Re-Armament’ … The indefatigable Mr. H.G. Wells is known to be preparing his miraculous ‘World Revolution’ at the Savoy Grill. OPEN IN VIEWER

Ould’s conjecture that the P.E.N. India Centre, founded by Sophia Wadia in 1933, was disdained by young Indian writers based in England likely had to do with the context of heightening Indian nationalism. As a forum for anticolonial Indian nationalist thought, Rehana Ahmed notes that Indian Writing enabled its editors and contributors to support the ‘advancement, valorisation and dissemination of a national culture, important to the emergent independent nation … and it did so, most strikingly, from within the colonial metropolis’. ³² Given that some of the most influential South Asian writers in wartime London aligned themselves with this powerful strain of anticolonial nationalism, it is likely that the P.E.N. India Centre was inadequately radical in its politics to appeal to them.

By contrast, correspondence between Wadia and British P.E.N. suggests that during the WWII era, she was more inclined to focus on the shared threat of global fascism than to press on issues of British–Indian political tension. Certainly, she objected to P.E.N.’s focus on the social to the exclusion of the political. In a letter to Ould dated December 4, 1935, for instance, Wadia wrote,

Our Managing Committee met here on the 2nd of December … it was decided that protection of the right of authors to freedom of expression is a primary concern of the P.E.N., social activities being of comparatively slight importance! ³³

This is not to say that Wadia, in her leadership of Indian P.E.N., steered away from Indian nationalism. The very fact that she oversaw the P.E.N. All-India Writers’ Conference in Jaipur in 1945 is a testament to her openness to varied and critical perspectives on Indian–British relations, both literary and colonial. A glance at the conference programme confirms that while there are a number of presentations that would comport with the P.E.N. tradition of thinking about literature in terms of universal liberal values (‘Moral Values in Literature’, ‘The Philosophical Basis of Toleration’, ‘Aesthetic Values in Literature’), many talks engaged directly with concerns of imperialism and political disenfranchisement (‘The Development of the Indian Literatures as Uniting Force’, ‘Conditions of Freedom in Literature’, ‘Power Without Responsibility’). ³⁷ Moreover, against the notion of a hard philosophical division between Indian P.E.N. and Indian Writing, the London-based Progressive Writers’ Association, which as previously mentioned shared members and an anticolonial orientation with Indian Writing, was among the literary organisations affiliated with the conference ³⁸ ; PWA members Sajjad Zaheer and Mulk Raj Anand were in attendance. Certainly, there are signs in the conference proceedings that some Indian P.E.N. members supported the organisation’s traditional separation of literature from politics; Ramananda Chatterjee, for example, argued that a ‘present-day tendency which is to be deprecated is the fashion to classify authors according to their political, politico-economic, or socio-political isms, Marxism being the latest vogue’. ³⁹ At the same time, Mulk Raj Anand offered this hearty greeting to Indian P.E.N. on behalf of the Marxist-identified PWA:

I would like to take this occasion to deliver to you a message of good-will which many of my friends among the younger writers in Britain entrusted to me for you … Our [PWA-affiliated] friends in Europe are already busy thinking, writing, and re-evaluating their values, and they wish us well while we are gathered here, by the wayside, to pool our thoughts. ⁴⁰

Despite historic fissures between P.E.N.-style liberalism and Indian Writing’s principled anticolonialism, the proceedings of the conference, published for the P.E.N. India Centre by the International Book House in Bombay (present-day Mumbai) in 1947, demonstrate significant overlap with Indian Writing commentaries. In fact, the conference proceedings include many positions and passages that could almost have appeared in the forthrightly nationalist pages of Indian Writing. Writers affiliated with both Indian P.E.N. and Indian Writing resented British disinterest in the linguistic, ethnic, cultural and political diversity of the empire. Mrs Gertrude Emerson Sen’s tart observation at the Jaipur conference – ‘Unfortunately, the British on the whole are bad linguists, and so they have conveniently decided that it is up to the rest of the world to learn English’ ⁴¹ – echoes the frustration of the summer 1942 Indian Writing editorial:

It is impossible not to be impressed by the striking unanimity of British attitude towards India and the subject peoples of the Empire generally—a unanimity which embraces the Right as well as a good part of the Left … intellectual ‘socialists’ like Laski and senile Anglo-India in retirement … all speak with virtually the same voice and iterate the same outworn imbecilities. ⁴²

From this perspective, it is little wonder that the Manifesto of the Progressive Writers’ Association, which appeared in the February 1936 issue of the London-based Left Review, emphasised the imperative to set the terms of an anticolonial literature to raise the visibility of Indian cultures both across India and across the empire. Consistent with Laura Winkiel’s discussion of the genre of the manifesto as communicating ‘a conceptual break with the past’ to ‘intervene in history’ and allow for ‘new realms of possibility’, ⁴⁹ the PWA Manifesto calls for a politically engaged literature to transform civil and political Indian life, partly by making visible forces of suppression and partly by forging new, progressive ways of conceptualising a heterogeneous Indian nation. While the Manifesto is significantly focused on literature and translation as tools to cultivate progressivism and unify a linguistically diverse India, a primary emphasis of the Manifesto is the ‘duty of Indian writers … to assist the spirit of progress in the country’ by countering the impacts of British colonial rule: ‘political subjection,’ ‘racial antagonism and exploitation of man by man’. ⁵⁰ A literature of emancipation would require the deconstruction of an exclusive binary between politics and aesthetics. The question remained whether white British members of P.E.N. would acknowledge these terms in the interest of more equal exchange and collaboration.

A Literature to Transform Rather Than Transcend Politics

Whereas P.E.N. originally advocated the avoidance or transcendence of politics in the interest of fostering international goodwill and universal humanist values as conditions for peace, the network of progressive Indian writers considered here had no apprehensions about steering directly into politics – in fact, as Wadia wrote in her foreword to a volume on Bengali literature published by the P.E.N. India Centre, Indian writers could hardly do otherwise. ‘India has great justification for being preoccupied with politics for her servitude affects her indigenous culture on every plane,’ she writes. While ‘in other countries politics revolves round other ideas and ideals, other hopes and aspirations’, India’s ‘ruling passion is for freedom from foreign domination’. ⁵¹ Both Wadia and the editors of Indian Writing sought to naturalise the intersection of literature with politics as an avenue toward progressive Indian nationalism.

For Wadia and her colleagues at the Jaipur P.E.N. conference, politically engaged literature was necessary to counter the binary dynamic of imperialism that shaped power in international affairs leading up to and during WWII. In his address to the Jaipur conference, Mr Kshitimohan Sen despaired that ‘authority on the one hand and servility on the other continu[e] to be the order of the day throughout the world.’ ⁵² Many Indian writers connected with Indian P.E.N. recognised the role that the British imperial emphasis on ‘high culture’ – formal aesthetics ostensibly devoid of politics – played in perpetuating this dynamic; after all, who was served by the obscuring of political disenfranchisement and economic inequality with the focus on pure form? Scholar Ruvani Ranasinha notes that Indian writers who perceived ‘purely formal engagement with’ literature as ‘one of the legacies of the civilizing mission’ ⁵³ were suspicious of ‘high culture’ ‘as an instrument of imperial didacticism’, deployed for instance by the BBC Indian Service, ‘aimed at India’s opinion-forming intelligentsia and students, in the hope of maintaining the conditional allegiance of the Indian nationalists’. ⁵⁴ Indian writers’ pursuit of politically engaged literature was, therefore, a direct attempt to disrupt imperial values and logic.

Politically engaged literature was thus a tool of resistance, but for these writers, it was also a powerful advocacy tool to define and promote progressive Indian nationalism on the eve of Independence. As Wadia wrote in her introduction to Bengali Literature,

Visions of literary creators enshrined in books of today are likely to become objective realities of tomorrow … the psychological analyses of the novelist, the philosophical expositions of the essayist, the tendency portrayals and the character delineations of the dramatist—these are related to the very problems which engage the whole consciousness of the politician, the economist and the sociologist. ⁵⁵

Compromised Mutuality

A key condition of building a progressive Indian nationalism that disrupted imperialist logic was to open up channels for mutual literary exchange between India and England. But as K. R. Srinivasa Iyengar pointed out, ‘this traffic in international culture has necessarily to be a two-way traffic. India had to give as well as to receive.’ ⁶¹

Members of British P.E.N. who attended the Jaipur conference were enthused about the prospects for Indian–British literary exchange. In an August 1945 letter to E. M. Forster regarding his imminent international travels on behalf of P.E.N., Herman Ould wrote that while ‘Poland is a duty trip that offers no attractions!’, ‘I am looking forward to this Indian trip with so much pleasure now, and hope nothing will get in the way of it.’ ⁶² In his address to delegates at the Jaipur conference, he conveyed warm greetings and messages of support from writers including Storm Jameson, Edith Sitwell, Desmond McCarthy, as well as from the Secretary of State for India Lord Pethick-Lawrence.

So much for the messages from these distinguished British writers. Of one thing I am sure. They all envy me today, because I am able to greet you, not through the medium of post or special messenger, but face to face. ⁶³

But did this mutuality come to fruition in P.E.N.? E. M. Forster’s address to the Jaipur conference demonstrates his nuanced awareness of rhetorical situation – he responded to multiple conditions for equality articulated by his Indian colleagues at the conference:

I have been shut up in my own island for the long time of six years, and I do not think I could ever have got out but for the efforts of the Indian P.E.N. I cannot thank them too warmly, particularly Madame Sophia Wadia, for their help … I came to India to listen and to learn, not to speak. But I have been asked to deliver a short address on the subject of prose in my country between the two wars, and perhaps what I say may be helpful in illuminating what has happened to Prose over here in India. ⁶⁴

It would seem that the recognition Ould and Forster demonstrated of their own limits, as well as of the perceptive limits of their compatriots, would form an important condition for these British writers to engage with Indian writers on terms of mutuality rather than hierarchy. However, other evidence points to the fact that British writers including Forster and Ould did retain notions of literary value that minimised Indian writing and centred British aesthetic authority. Though Ould likely edited himself in the presence of South Asian writers, letters he wrote privately display aspects of casual racism. For example, Ould wrote to Forster in response to Forster’s query about the author of the essay ‘Literature and Authorship in India’ submitted for the P.E.N. Book Series, ‘Unfortunately I have no information about K. R. Srinivasa Iyengar … I could ask Anand about him, but always hesitate before asking one Indian about another.’ ⁶⁶ (Incidentally, K. R. Srinivasa Iyengar is the writer who called for ‘two-way traffic’ of Indian and British cultural influence in his introduction to the proceedings of the Jaipur conference. ⁶⁷ ) And in another letter to Forster: ‘Sophia Wadia is always sending me Indians to comfort in some way.’ ⁶⁸ Quotes like these raise the question of what discriminatory habits of mind Ould may have inadvertently revealed in his efforts to recruit Indian writers to P.E.N.

Forster, too, ultimately centred the authority of the British liberal literary tradition while discounting the fundamental value of politically engaged Indian writing. Despite the open-mindedness and humility he displayed at the Jaipur conference, Forster ultimately reaffirmed his allegiance to literary aesthetic values as transcending politics and minimised the intellectual achievements of Indian writers who sought to transform rather than transcend politics. ⁶⁹ Believing, as Forster did, that P.E.N. should take a political position against fascist totalitarianism did not directly translate to an embrace of literature itself intersecting with politics, despite his immersion at the Jaipur conference; Forster, true to British P.E.N.’s roots, retained his investment in liberal ideals of literature as transcending politics, and in the notion that friendly personal relations might open up possibilities for progressive international relations. But one might argue that friendship, similar to collaboration, requires Portelli’s ‘mutual sighting’; and by rejecting his Indian colleagues’ centring of politics in literature, Forster may have failed to recognise Wadia’s point about political subjugation and the lived reality of Indian writers: ‘India has great justification for being preoccupied with politics for her servitude affects her indigenous culture on every plane.’ ⁷⁰

In this case, it seems that Forster did not recognise the legitimate reasons why, for many Indian intellectuals at the advent of independence, to write was to engage in politics. Writing as subjects of a colonising force, they did not enjoy the option or the privilege to side-step politics. Moreover, for Wadia and other Indian writers, steering directly into politics was the path forward to a transcendent literature. When Wadia wrote in the foreword to Bengali Literature that ‘Visions of literary creators enshrined in books … are related to the very problems which engage the whole consciousness of the politician, the economist and the sociologist,’ ⁷¹ she, like many of her colleagues writing in and about India, refused a binary between transcendent culture and politically engaged literature. Engaging literature with politics was a way to protest the ignorance of British readers regarding colonial injustices perpetrated in the name of their interests; it was a way to remedy British ‘blind spots’ when it came to the diversity and complexity of Indian life and literatures; and it was a way to insist that such blind spots sustained the imperial logic of cultural hierarchy, which made equality impossible. Moreover, writing politically engaged literature was a way to solicit collaboration in imagining the personal and political terms of equality, including a conception of anticolonial nationalism anchored in internationalist understanding and exchange rather than imperial expansionism. For Wadia and other Indian writers across the spectrum of leftism, politically engaged Indian literatures would transform rather than transcend politics by envisioning the terms of a progressive political future.

Conclusion

Certainly, P.E.N. was an intriguing forum for Indian and British writers alike who were interested in possibilities for collaboration and exchange in the fraught international context of WWII. As prominent British P.E.N. affiliates, Forster and Ould themselves demonstrated the measure of these possibilities; both were themselves deeply and positively impacted by experience of the Jaipur conference, and the experience undoubtedly enriched the personal and professional relationships they shared with Indian colleagues in attendance at the P.E.N. All-India Writers’ Conference. Yet their fundamental attitudes, centred on British liberal intellectualism and anchored in a universal ideal of literature as transcending politics, proved remarkably durable even on the eve of Indian independence. While there is clear evidence of intellectual exchange and influence between the Indian and British writers highlighted here, these failures of mutual sighting are representative of the overall fact that as an experiment in modernist-era collaboration, P.E.N. did not quite achieve its promise. Yet as a document of World-War-era P.E.N., the proceedings of the Jaipur conference offer an important statement of what collaboration means and what it requires, then as now. The repeated refrain throughout the document – that British readers and writers must ‘see’ the diversity of Indian life and literatures for there ever to be hope of relating on terms of equality across imbalances of power and privilege – continues to resonate powerfully in contexts of progressive advocacy.