South Asians in Britain: Literature and publishing by Discovering Literature – British Library

discovering_literature — 2025-12-03 13:47:33 UTC

Written by the Remaking Britain team. First published December 2025.

BL_Learning_4 — 2025-12-03 18:13:40 UTC

South Asians have been reshaping literature and publishing in the UK for over two centuries. In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, Indian travellers to Britain recounted their experiences in memoirs, offering new perspectives on aspects of British life. More Indians began to arrive in the early 20th century to study at UK universities. Some began their careers as writers among the celebrated Bloomsbury Group of writers, intellectuals and artists. They interacted with these figures at the BBC, broadcasting alongside them for the Eastern Service, as well as at political meetings. Writers including Mulk Raj Anand and Sajjad Zaheer combined anti-colonial activism with literary interests, bringing them together in their formation of the Progressive Writers’ Association in 1934. This was the first of many examples of South Asian writers’ collectives and activism in Britain which continue into the present.

In the early to mid-20th century Anand, along with Ahmed Ali and Aubrey Menen, among others, published novels with established London presses, while many more saw their stories, poems and essays appear in magazines. South Asians also worked as book and magazine editors, most notably V K Krishna Menon for Pelican Books and M J Tambimuttu as founding editor of Poetry London.

In the decades following independence, settled British South Asians began to make inroads into magazine and book publishing, despite obstacles, with pioneers including Sonny Mehta, Nikesh Shukla and Susheila Nasta. At the same time, South Asian writers pushed beyond the barriers of the UK publishing industry to success, including prizes. While the first novels of Ravinder Randhawa and Hanif Kureishi were pathbreaking for their early depictions of the lives of British Asians, today ‘British Asian writing’ defies categorisation, including a wide variety of forms and genres as well as thematic concerns.

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Travelling writers

South Asians have published firsthand accounts of Britain from the 18th century. The experiences of Bengali diplomat Mirza Itesa Modeen, who travelled to Britain and France in 1765, are captured in The Wonders of Vilayet, first published in Persian in 1785; while Iranian Indian administrator Mirza Abu Talib Khan wrote a book about his travels in Europe, Asia and Africa from 1799, translated as The Travels of Mirza Abu Taleb Khan. In 1794, Sake Dean Mahomed, an entrepreneur who established the first Indian restaurant in London and Mahomed’s Baths in Brighton, became the first South Asian to publish a book in Britain, with the hugely successful Travels of Dean Mahomet.

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In the late 19th century, Parsee journalist and champion of women’s suffrage Behramji Malabari recorded his observations about England in The Indian Eye on English Life, published with Constable & Co. in 1893. Atiya Fyzee wrote a diary about her experiences of London when studying at a teachers’ training college in 1906–07. First serialised in a monthly journal, it was published in book form, as Zamana-i-tahsil ('A Time of Education'), in 1921. Sarojini Naidu began writing poetry when a student at Girton College, Cambridge, in 1895–98, and returned to the UK in 1905 to tour her poetry collection The Golden Threshold, published by William Heinemann.

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Writers’ networks and activism

In the early 20th century, the BBC was a hub for connections and friendships between South Asians and other writers and intellectuals. In particular, the Indian Section of the BBC’s Eastern Service, launched in 1940 and with a brief to offer Indians a window into Britain, became a contact zone for writers including Narayana Menon, Venu Chitale, Cedric Dover, Mulk Raj Anand, Una Marson, T S Eliot, George Orwell and E M Forster, who came together to broadcast news, discussions and arts features. Literary friendships developed in the publishing houses and other intellectual spaces of Bloomsbury too, helped by the anti-imperialist views of many among this group of writers, including Leonard Woolf, the Sitwells and David Garnett. In the reading rooms of the British Museum Indian students read and wrote alongside their counterparts from Britain and other parts of the globe.

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South Asian writers in Britain have been forming collectives both to mobilise for political causes and to advocate for their own writing since the early 20th century. In 1934, a group of Indian writers, including Mulk Raj Anand, Sajjad Zaheer and Jyotirmaya Ghosh formed the Progressive Writers’ Association in the Nanking Restaurant in central London. They drafted a manifesto that pledged a commitment to literature that engaged with the social and political problems confronting India at the time. Influenced by left-wing writer Ralph Fox, among others, the association soon relocated to India with Zaheer, becoming the All-India Progressive Writers’ Association. A very different Progressive Writers’ Association formed in Southall, London, around 1962, consisting mainly of Punjabi factory workers who shared their work in a local pub. Around two decades later, in 1984, writer Ravinder Randhawa founded the Asian Women Writers’ Collective, which supported and promoted creative writing by South Asian women based in Britain, giving them access to publishing opportunities. With core members including Rukhsana Ahmed, Meera Syal and Tanika Gupta, the organisation went on to publish two anthologies of writing before folding in 1997 due to cuts to arts funding.

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The Whole Kahani, a contemporary British Asian women’s writing collective, has published three anthologies of writing since their formation in 2011. Other recent anthologies have brought together Muslim women writers, many of them South Asian, for example Sabeena Akhtar’s 2023 Cut from the Same Cloth. In 2016 Nikesh Shukla’s high-profile anthology The Good Immigrant did much to raise the profile of writers of colour more broadly and Shukla’s activist work continued with his establishment of The Good Literary Agency (2017–25) and the Jhalak Prize (2017–), co-founded with novelist and academic Sunny Singh.

From the 1970s, writers, directors, actors and artists were brought together through new theatre companies born out of social activism and focussed on staging South Asian stories.

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Book and magazine publishing

The early 20th century saw publishing success for a number of South Asian writers, most of whom came to London as students. Mulk Raj Anand’s first novel Untouchable was published by Wishart in 1935, thanks to the endorsement of E M Forster. Anand also worked as an editor at Virginia and Leonard Woof’s Hogarth Press, which published works by Communist Rajani Palme Dutt and writer Ahmed Ali, among others. V K Krishna Menon, best known for his political activism and as India’s first High Commissioner in the UK, edited the Twentieth Century Library series for The Bodley Head (1932–35) and founded Penguin’s non-fiction educational imprint Pelican Books in 1935.

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New writing by Indians was reviewed by leading literary magazines of the period, including Life and Letters and the Left Review. South Asian writers also reviewed and wrote for these magazines. In fact, they played an important role in magazine publishing from the mid-20th century. In 1939, Meary James Tambimuttu, a Sri Lankan poet, launched Poetry London which published some of the most influential poets of the period, including W H Auden and Lawrence Durrell. Shortly afterwards, in 1940, the magazine Indian Writing was founded by writers Iqbal Singh, Ahmed Ali, K S Shelvankar and Alagu Subramaniam. Based at Indian lecturer and activist Sasadhar Sinha’s central London bookshop The Bibliophile, Indian Writing published stories, essays and book reviews, and was a platform for the editors’ anti-colonial viewpoints on the cusp of Indian independence. While Indian Writing folded after around two years, Poetry London continued until 1951, surviving the difficult years of the Second World War.

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These literary ventures were driven by Indians who were temporarily in Britain. In the decades following independence, as increasing numbers of South Asians settled in Britain, their influence slowly made its way back into magazine culture, thanks partly to the Greater London Council’s investment in the artistic production of ethnic minorities. The GLC supported Mukti, a feminist magazine produced by South Asian women that ran from 1983 until around 1987, and it was one of the many funders that underpinned the longevity and success of Wasafiri (1984–), a magazine of international contemporary writing founded by Susheila Nasta. While the underrepresentation of people of colour working in the book publishing industry has been well documented, South Asian pioneers include publisher Sonny Mehta who helped shape the literary scene in 1970s’ and 1980s’ Britain, Nikesh Shukla, and, most recently, Bradford-based Fox and Windmill, the UK’s first independent publishing company run by and for British South Asians. Meanwhile, Rozina Visram published her pathbreaking books Ayahs, Lascars and Princes, 1700–1947 (1987) and Asians in Britain: 400 Years of History (2000), which uncovered the depth and breadth of the history of South Asians in Britain.

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Prizes and success

In 1913, Bengali writer Rabindranath Tagore became the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize for Literature for his poetry collection Gitanjali, first published in a limited edition of 750 copies by the Indian Society of London. It took nearly 60 years for another South Asian writer to receive such a major endorsement by the western literary world: Trinidadian Indian writer V S Naipaul won the Booker Prize for his novel In a Free State in 1971. A decade later, Salman Rushdie was awarded the same prize for his novel Midnight’s Children, which went on to win the Best of the Booker Prize in both 1993 and 2008.

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While Tagore and Rushdie were migrants to Britain, neither of them remaining here, British-born or -settled Asian writers began to make an impact on literature from the late 1980s. Ravinder Randhawa’s groundbreaking novel A Wicked Old Woman, published by The Women’s Press in 1987, was arguably the first to depict the lives of members of a British Asian community. It was followed in 1990 by Hanif Kureishi’s celebrated novel The Buddha of Suburbia, which won the Whitbread First Novel Award. Poets Imtiaz Dharker and Moniza Alvi published their first solo collections in the same period (Purdah and other poems, 1988; The Country at My Shoulder, 1993), with some of their poems later making their way onto GCSE English curricula.

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In the 21st century, we have witnessed the success of increasing numbers of British Asian writers from a variety of backgrounds. Authors who have won or been nominated for major literary prizes include Monica Ali, Nadeem Aslam, Kamila Shamsie and Sunjeev Sahota. The inauguration in 2017 of the Jhalak Prize, ringfenced for UK or Ireland based writers of colour, has raised the profile of British Asian writing broadly, as well as of individual winners Guy Gunaratne, Sabba Khan and Hiba Noor Khan. There has also been an expansion in the range of forms and genres used – from the experimental writing of Mona Arshi and Sheena Patel, to the crime and romance series fiction of Kia Abdullah and Ayisha Malik, to the children’s novels of Sita Brahmachari and Nazneen Ahmed Pathak, and the poetry of Zaffar Kunial and Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan.