Abstract
After the First World War, most Indian students, academics, artists and religious evangels would have found ready for them in London a niche within one or another established expatriate milieu. But their predecessors, the intellectual itinerants of the 1890s, negotiated more precarious, more solitary trans- Suez pilgrimages. They also enjoyed greater novelty of experience, liberality of association and – privilege of the exile – freedom to explore occult identities and ideological positions. Theirs was an experimental generation, the metropolis their laboratory. The most prominent among them, the barrister-turned- activist M. K. Gandhi, memorably subtitled his autobiography The Story of My Experiments with Truth.
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Notes
Judith Brown, ‘Gandhi–a Victorian Gentleman: An Essay in Imperial Encounter’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 27:2 (1999), 68–85 (p. 68).
M. K. Gandhi, The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, 100 vols. (Delhi: Government of India, 1958), XXXIX, 46–8 (henceforward CWMG).
His experiences on these visits are detailed in James D. Hunt, Gandhi in London (Delhi: Promilla, 1978).
Stephen Hay, ‘The Making of a Late- Victorian Hindu: M. K. Gandhi in London, 1888–1891’, Victorian Studies 33:1 (1989), 74–98 (p. 930); Brown, ‘Gandhi’, p. 82; CWMG, I, 54.
CWMG, XXXIX, 67; James Gregory, Of Victorians and Vegetarians: The Vegetarian Movement in Nineteenth- Century Britain (London: Tauris, 2007), pp. 65–7.
Henry Thoreau, Walden, Civil Disobedience and other writings, ed. W. J. Rossi, 3rd edn (New York: Norton, 2008), p. 234; CWMG, IX, 389.
CWMG, XXXIX, 139, 195; Rudyard Kipling, The Sussex Edition of the Complete Works in Prose and Verse of Rudyard Kipling, 35 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1937–9), XXIII, 432 (henceforward CWRK).
M. N. Srinivas, ‘The Indian Village: Myth and Reality’, in The Village in India, ed. Vandana Madan (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 52.
Joseph Doke, M. K. Gandhi: An Indian Patriot in South Africa (London: London Indian Chronicle, 1909), p. 92.
Lord Frederick Birkenhead, Rudyard Kipling (New York: Random House, 1978), p. 340.
Amiya Sen, Swami Vivekananda (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 21, 53.
Romain Rolland, The Life of Vivekananda and the Universal Gospel: A Study of Mysticism and Action in Living India, trans. E. F. Malcolm- Smith (Calcutta: Advaita Ashrama, 1984), p. 327.
A. K. Singh, Indian Students in Britain: A Survey of their Adjustment and Attitudes (Bombay: Asia Publishing House, c. 1963), p. 21.
Rama Jha, ‘The Influence of Gandhian Thought on Indo- Anglian Novelists of the Thirties and Forties’, Journal of South Asian Literature 16:2 (1981), 163–72 (p. 168).
Mulk Raj Anand, Author to Critic: The Letters of Mulk Raj Anand, ed. Saros Cowasjee (Calcutta: Writers Workshop, 1973), p. 52.
Mulk Raj Anand, Conversations in Bloomsbury (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 51, 116.
Mulk Raj Anand, Untouchable (London: Penguin, 1940), p. 156.
Mulk Raj Anand, Letters on India (London: Routledge, 1942), pp. 152–8.
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© 2013 Alexander Bubb
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Bubb, A. (2013). Tracing the Legacy of an Experimental Generation: Three Iconic Indian Travellers in 1890s London. In: Nasta, S. (eds) India in Britain. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230392724_4
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