Academic scholarship on James Joyce’s work has shown over the past three decades a shift toward the local, and has highlighted the deep embeddedness of Joyce’s work in Ireland, especially Dublin. This may be viewed as a move away from earlier “universalist” or “globalizing” readings, where Joyce’s stature as a modernist, his formal experimentation, and his anticipation of later conceptions of literary textuality occupied centerstage. How do we think Joyce’s location in our present? What in Joyce can travel, in space and in time? This chapter focuses on the persistent preoccupation in Joyce’s work – notably Ulysses and Finnegans Wake – with recollection, especially with modes of remembrance that extend beyond individuals to encompass multiple levels of the past. It examines the afterlife of this concern in India by discussing Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable (English, 1935), Devanoora Mahadeva’s Kusumabale (Kannada, 1988), and Anand’s Vyasanum Vighneswaranum (Malayalam, 1996). Through a consideration of forms of narration emerging from contexts where the relationship between instituted archives and literary citation is rendered difficult, the chapter delineates “destitute” modes of recollection foregrounded in strands of Indian modernism.

Some of the most celebrated writers of the 1930s generation dabbled with Marxist politics, but later renounced their earlier political commitments. A Cold War critical consensus emerged that saw Communism and its socialist realist theory of art as deadening forces, that were incompatible with good writing. Shifting the focus to some less canonical figures, the chapter sees the relationship between Communism and literature in the 1930s as a more productive one. The chapter focuses on three ‘conversion narratives’, whose protagonists move from false consciousness to political commitment: Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Summer Will Show, Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable, and Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s A Scots Quair. These novels have complicated relationships to socialist realism. They want to cut through ideological fog and to see ‘reality as it is’ and ‘whither it is moving’ (in Radek’s phrase), but they use modernist literary techniques to this end, and grapple with epistemological doubt. They also complicate the traditional Marxist emphasis on class by putting it into dialogue with gender, sexuality, race, national identity, and rural identity.

This chapter examines the 1930s urban fiction of Mulk Raj Anand, who adopts a self-avowedly Joycean emphasis on local specificity and engages critically with the Indian cities imagined by contemporaries including Rudyard Kipling, Aldous Huxley and E. M. Forster. If the city in Forster’s A Passage to India affirms a sense of the text’s spatial and narrative limits, Anand’s detailed representation of Bombay in his novel Coolie (1936) – which follows the short life of a worker who migrates to the port city – enacts a shift away from this emphasis on unknowable cultural divides, presenting difference as integral to the organisation of the metrocolonial economy. Showing how this subverts the narrative of ‘imperial maturity’ central to the city’s colonial identity, the chapter aligns Anand’s writing with other modernist fictions from metrocolonial zones.