freedom of expression

New India Publishing Co

About: 

Relatively little is known about this publishing venture. It is probable that it was founded by D. P. Chaudhuri who was also deputy editor of Asian Horizon (1948-1950). Mulk Raj Anand and Iqbal Singh were the editors of one of its few known outputs, Indian Short Stories (1946). Its other outputs include an anthology of poems by Indians in English, including work by Manmohan Ghose, Sarojini Naidu and G. K. Chettur, and a translation of Tagore's Farewell, My Friend. The founding editors of the company were keen that there should be a publisher of work by Indians in London that was actually run by Indians - and that Indians should be interpreting and evaluating the 'West' for their fellow countrymen, as well as interpreting the 'East' for Britons and the 'West'. They aimed for as wide a range of work on Indian culture and civilization as possible, incorporating all 'fields of thought' represented by both established and younger Indian writers, as well as by Chinese, 'Persian' and 'Arabian' writers.

Published works: 

Anand, Mulk Raj and Singh, Iqbal (eds), Indian Short Stories (1946)

Gangulee, Nagendranath, Sher Shah: The Bengal Tiger (1946)

Kabir, Humayun, Men and Rivers (1947)

Kabraji, Fredoon (ed.), This Strange Adventure: An Anthology of Poems in English by Indians, 1828-1946 (1947)

Tagore, Rabindranath, Farewell, My Friend, trans. by K. R. Kripalani (1949)

Example: 

Programme of the New India Publishing Company Limited, endpapers of Anand, Mulk Raj and Singh, Iqbal (eds), Indian Short Stories (1946)

Content: 

This is the manifesto of the company, stating its objectives and its scope.

Date began: 
01 Jan 1946
Extract: 

For a long time past there has been felt the need of an Indian Publishing House in London organised by Indians. There are Indian organisations in Great Britain which issue from time to time pamphlets, leaflets and news bulletins, but these are for the most part of ephemeral character. These efforts should be supplemented by literature of permanent value written by Indians on various aspects of Indian culture, civilization and particularly on modern trends of thought in relation to Indian renaissance.

But the basis of free and creative cooperation between India and the Western world cannot be securely established without a closer understanding of all progressive movements outside India, the development of which should be interpreted by Indians themselves. In other words, there should be ample facilities not only for the interpretation of Indian problems for the West by Indians but also for their own critical evaluation of the West for the East. Only by such two-way traffic of disseminating ideas can we achieve a definite synthesis between them.

Precise date began unknown: 
Y
Key Individuals' Details: 

Mulk Raj Anand (editor of Indian Short Stories), D. P. Chaudhuri (founding editor), Enid Furlonger (illustrator of Sher Shah), Nagendranath Gangulee (author of Sher Shah, resident in London in 1945), Fredoon Kabraji (editor of This Strange Adventure), Iqbal Singh (editor of Indian Short Stories).

Relevance: 

This passage from the manifesto is evidence of the assertiveness of the Indian writers involved in the foundation of this company. Their emphasis on the need for a publishing house in Britain run by Indians is suggestive of a perception of their status in Britain as equal, endowing them with the right to compete with British publishers on British soil. Indeed their clear advocacy of 'free and creative cooperation between Britain and the Western world', and of the need for 'Indian themselves' to interpret 'progressive movements' and other events in the West, further underlines their understanding of the relationship between India and Britain as one of equals, forged by a 'two-way' dissemination of ideas.

Date ended: 
01 Jan 1950
Precise date ended unknown: 
Y

Location

17 Irving Street Leicester Square
London, WC2H 7AU
United Kingdom

E. M. Forster

About: 

Edward Morgan Forster was brought up by his mother, Alice Clara (Lily) Whichelo, after his architect father died in 1880. Despite his father’s premature death, he was raised in relative affluence, attending Tonbridge School and later King’s College, Cambridge, where he studied classics and history and began to write fiction. After a period of travelling in Europe, in 1904 he settled with his mother in Weybridge where all of his six novels, including Howards End (1910), were completed. In 1906 he began to tutor the young Syed Ross Masood in Latin in preparation for the latter’s Oxford degree. Forster fell in love with Masood; while his feelings were unreciprocated, the two developed a close friendship, and Forster claimed it was through Masood that he developed a lifelong and passionate interest in India, particularly Muslim India. It was also through Masood that he met several other young Indians studying in Britain in the early twentieth century – many of whom went on to assume important professional including governmental positions in India.

Between October 1912 and April 1913, Forster travelled through India, staying initially with Masood and his family in Aligarh before visiting Delhi, Lahore, the Kyber Pass, Simla, Allahabad, Benares and Bankipore, among other places. This trip bore the seeds of his novel A Passage to India which he began to write on his return to Weybridge. From 1915 to 1919, during the First World War, he was based in Alexandria where he served as a Red Cross searcher and continued to write stories and essays. In 1921, Forster returned to India for a short period to take up the position of Private Secretary to the Maharajah of Dewas. Back in London, he continued work on A Passage to India. By this time, he enjoyed a considerable literary reputation, reviewing for several magazines and associating with members of the Bloomsbury Group and other renowned writers of the day.

It was arguably with the publication of A Passage to India in 1924 that he can be said to have achieved fame, becoming a commentator and broadcaster, as well as a reviewer and essayist, a spokesperson and figurehead for individual freedoms, liberalism and tolerance, and a critic of the inequalities of race and empire. In 1935 he attended the Paris Congress of International Writers for the Defence of Culture, where his talk, titled ‘Liberty in England’, highlighted the partiality of this notion and the failure to apply it to India. Mulk Raj Anand and Sajjad Zaheer were also present at the Congress, and many of the speeches there were said to be seminal to their subsequent foundation of the Progressive Writers’ Association. In 1945, Forster returned to India to attend the All-India PEN Conference in Jaipur where Sarojini Naidu, Nehru and Radhakrishnan all spoke.

Forster developed friendships with numerous Indian writers, often facilitating their entry into the British literary world by recommending writers to publishers, offering advice to them, writing prefaces to their work, or reviewing it favourably. For example, he praised Iqbal’s Secrets of Self, Tagore’s Chitra and Tambimuttu’s Poetry in Wartime in reviews, and wrote introductions to G. V. Desani’s Hali and – most famously – Mulk Raj Anand’s The Untouchable, which was rejected nineteen times before Wishart accepted the manuscript with Forster’s endorsement. In the 1930s and 1940s, he gave several BBC radio broadcasts, including to Indian audiences in the series ‘We Talk to India: Some Books’. Whether broadcasting to the British or to Indians, he frequently discussed fiction by Indian writers of the time, thereby further legitimizing this work. Forster also agreed to the Indian playwright Santha Rama Rau adapting A Passage to India for the theatre in 1960. He maintained many of these connections through correspondence for much of his life, and several Indian writers marked their appreciation to Forster by contributing to K. Natwar-Singh’s volume of essays in honour of the writer.

On his mother’s death in 1945, Forster moved from their home in Surrey to rooms in King’s College, which granted him an honorary fellowship. He based himself at King’s until his death in 1970, continuing his interest in the Indian subcontinent and his friendship for its people throughout.

Published works: 

Where Angels Fear to Tread (London: Edward Arnold, 1905)

The Longest Journey (Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood & Sons, 1907)

A Room with a View (London: Edward Arnold, 1908)

Howards End (London: Edward Arnold, 1910)

A Passage to India (London: Edward Arnold, 1924)

Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson (London: Edward Arnold, 1934)

Abinger Harvest (London: Edward Arnold, 1936)

Two Cheers for Democracy (London: Edward Arnold, 1951)

The Hills of Devi: Being Letters from Dewas State Senior (London: Edward Arnold, 1953)

Maurice: A Novel (London: Edward Arnold, 1971)

Only Connect: Letters to Indian Friends, ed. by Syed Hamid Husain (London: Arnold-Heinemann, 1979)

(with Mary Lago and P. N. Furbank) Selected Letters of E. M. Forster (London: Collins, 1983)

Date of birth: 
01 Jan 1879
Connections: 

J. R. Ackerley, Muhammad al-Adl, Syed Ali Akbar, Ahmed Ali, Mulk Raj Anand, Vanessa Bell, Zulfikhar Bokhari, Robert Bridges, Benjamin Britten, May Buckingham, Robert Buckingham, Edward Carpenter, C. Cavafy, Nirad Chaudhury, Hsiao Ch'ien, Eric Crozier, M. V. Desai, G. V. Desani, Mukul Dey, Cedric Dover, T. S. Eliot, Roger Fry, Duncan Grant, Robert Graves, Christiana Herringham, Aldous Huxley, Akbar Hydari, Lady Hydari, Mohammad Iqbal, K. R. Srinivasa Iyengar, Amin Jung, John Maynard Keynes, Vilayat Khan, D. H. Lawrence, T. E. Lawrence, John Lehmann, Cecil Day Lewis, Desmond MacCarthy, Walter de la Mare, Akbar Masood, Syed Ross Masood, Sheikh Mohammad Meer, Narayana Menon, Abu Saeed Mirza, Ahmad Mirza, Sajjad Mirza, Naomi Mitchison, Syed Mohiuddin, Ajit Mookerjee, R. K. Narayan, George Orwell, Balachanda Rajan, Abdur Rashid, Raja Rao, Santha Rama Rau, William Rothenstein, Jamini Roy, Siegfried Sassoon, Ranjee Shahani, Haroon Khan Sherwani, K. Natwar-Singh, Stephen Spender, Lytton Strachey, Rabindranath Tagore, M. J. Tambimuttu, S. A. Vahid, H. G. Wells, Leonard Woolf, Virginia Woolf, Sajjad Zaheer.

National Council for Civil Liberties

Contributions to periodicals: 
Secondary works: 

Ackerley, J. R., E. M. Forster: A Portrait (London: Ian McKelvie, 1970)

Beauman, Nicola, Morgan: A Biography of E. M. Forster (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1993)

Copley, Antony, A Spiritual Bloomsbury: Hinduism and Homosexuality in the Lives and Writing of Edward Carpenter, E. M. Forster, and Christopher Isherwood (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2006)

Forster, E. M. and Gardner, Philip, Commonplace Book (London: Scolar, 1985)

Furbank, Philip Nicholas, E. M. Forster: A Life, vol. 1: The Growth of the Novelist (1879-1914) (London: Secker & Warburg, 1977)

Furbank, Philip Nicholas, E. M. Forster: A Life, vol. 2: Polycrates' Ring (1914-1970) (London: Secker & Warburg, 1978)

Gardner, Philip and Forster, Edward Morgan, E. M. Forster: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973)

King, Francis Henry, E. M. Forster and His World (London: Thames & Hudson, 1978)

Kirkpatrick, Brownlee Jean and Forster, Edward Morgan, A Bibliography of E. M. Forster...With a Foreword by E. M. Forster (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1965)

Lago, Mary, Calendar of the Letters of E. M. Forster (London: Mansell, 1985)

McDowell, Frederick P. W., E. M. Forster: An Annotated Bibliography of Writings About Him (De Kalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1976)

Plomer, William, At Home: Memoirs (London: Jonathan Cape, 1958)

Stape, John Henry, E. M. Forster: Interviews and Recollections (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992)

Stape, John Henry, An E. M. Forster Chronology (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1993)

Trilling, Lionel, E. M. Forster: A Study (London: Hogarth Press, 1944)

Woolf, Leonard, Sowing: An Autobiography of the Years, 1880-1904 (London: Hogarth, 1960)

Woolf, Virginia and Bell, Anne Olivier, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, 5 vols (London: Hogarth Press, 1977-84)

Archive source: 

Correspondence, literary manuscripts, journals, other papers, King's College Archive Centre, Cambridge

Letters, Historical Manuscripts Commission, National Register of Archives

Letters and literary manuscripts, Richard A. Gleeson Library, University of San Francisco

Letters to S. S. Koteliansky, Add. Ms 48974, British Library, St Pancras 

Correspondence with the Society of Authors, Add. Ms 56704, British Library, St Pancras 

Correspondence with Marie Stopes, Add. Ms 58502, British Library, St Pancras 

Correspondence with Sibyl Colefax, Bodleian Library, Oxford

Letters to E. J. Thompson, Bodleian Library, Oxford

Letters to V. N. Datta, Cambridge University Library

Letters to Lord Kennet and Lady Kennet, Cambridge University Library

Correspondence with Christopher Isherwood, Huntington Library, San Marino, California 

Letters to Sir George Barnes, King's College Archive Centre, Cambridge 

Letters to Vanessa Bell, King's College Archive Centre, Cambridge

Correspondence with the Buckingham family, King's College Archive Centre, Cambridge

Correspondence with A. E. Felkin, King's College Archive Centre, Cambridge 

Correspondence with J. M. Keynes, King's College Archive Centre, Cambridge

Letters, postcards, and telegram to G. H. W. Rylands, King's College Archive Centre, Cambridge

Letters to W. G. H. Sprott, King's College Archive Centre, Cambridge

Correspondence with Sir B. H. Liddell Hart, Liddell Hart C., King's London

Correspondence with James Hanley, Liverpool Record Office and Local Studies Service

Letters to Naomi Mitchison, National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh

Letters to Hugh Walpole, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas

Correspondence with Lord Clark, Tate Collection

Letters to Elizabeth Trevelyan, Trinity College, Cambridge

Letters to William Plomer, Durham University

Letters to Kingsley Martin, University of Sussex Special Collections

Correspondence with New Statesman magazine, University of Sussex Special Collections

Correspondence with Leonard Woolf, University of Sussex Special Collections

Correspondence with Leonard Woolf and Virginia Woolf, University of Sussex Special Collections

Correspondence and statements relating to the trial of Lady Chatterley's Lover, University of Bristol Library

Letters to Sir Alex Randall, McPherson Library, University of Victoria, British Columbia

Performance recordings, National Sound Archive, British Library

Involved in events: 

Congress of International Writers for the Defence of Culture, Paris, 1935

All-India PEN Conference, Jaipur, 1945

City of birth: 
London
Country of birth: 
England
Other names: 

Edward Morgan Forster

Date of death: 
07 Jun 1970
Location of death: 
11 Salisbury Avenue, Coventry
Location: 

Dryhurst, Dryhill Park Road, Tonbridge; King's College, Cambridge; 11 Drayton Court, South Kensington, London; Weybridge; West Hackhurst, Abinger Hammer, Surrey.

Subscribe to RSS - freedom of expression