Bloomsbury, South Asia, and Empire

“Bloomsbury,” South Asia and empire have always been closely interconnected. Until recently, scholarship has focused primarily on discussions of E. M. Forster’s novel A Passage to India (1924), Leonard Woolf’s autobiography Growing detailing his years living in Ceylon, his novel The Village in the Jungle (1913), and Stories of the East (1921), or Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925). Whilst revisiting the Bloomsbury group’s close relations with pre-1947 colonial India (now independent India, Pakistan and Bangladesh), and Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), this chapter will open up the presence of “South Asia” within Bloomsbury to consider it as a transnational geographical and intellectual contact zone, a location that linked members of the Bloomsbury group with key South Asian writers, radicals and intellectuals, including Mulk Raj Anand, Meary James Tambimuttu and Aubrey Menen, and their networks. It will offer a differently articulated idea of a transnational modernity, one situated outside the orthodoxies of Modernism’s Euro-American canon, and which presents a more variegated consideration of the complex and dynamic exchanges that were taking place at the heart of empire.