Response to Ruth's Response

I too rather enjoyed both sections from the Conversations in Bloomsbury packets as well as the Berman piece. I especially appreciated the budding (if not fully formed) intimacy and mutual appreciation evident between Anand and his Western contemporaries. What becomes evident in the reading is Anand's place in a dynamic, ever-evolving culture of ideas which, coupled with his knowledge of Indian culture and myth constructs his unique brand of regional cosmopolitanism. Anand's time in England allowed him to observe social customs abroad which both coincided with and diverged from those of his homeland. Modernist thought became especially paramount in informing (and in some senses determining) his aesthetic choices, all while leaving his concern with India's socio-political climate definitively in tact.

As Berman states, dalit literature, "demonstrates the importance of conceiving modernism as a mode of writing that arises in many forms, guises, and locations in response to the social, political, and aesthetic developments of modernity. Writers in the colonies not only responded to local traditions and the writing they knew from abroad but also developed their own forms and modes, which in turn contributed to literary development both at home and abroad." Anand seemed fixed in these crosscurents, all the while focalizing India within this Modernist maelstrom. To again quote Berman, "Modernism does not move in one direction from Europe to the colonies, or even from the colonies straight back to Europe, but rather must be seen as part of a multidirectional flow of global literature and culture, with streams of discourse that also move around within a country and, as in the connection between Joyce and Anand, even from colony to metropolis to another colony and back again." In short, Anand's work seems to remain equally independent and inseparable from Western influence-a necessarily Modernist anomaly.