John Raimo (Faculty of English, University of Oxford)
Cut Neither East Nor West: Louis MacNeice, Irish History, And India At 1947
I propose to discuss the parallels drawn between the Indian Partition and Irish history as drawn by the Anglo-Irish poet and radio producer Louis MacNeice (1907-1963), on assignment for the BBC in Pakistan and India from August to October 1947. MacNeice reported on the Independence ceremonies in Delhi that August after speaking with such figures as Louis Mountbatten, Jawaharlal Nehru, and Sarojini Naidu. He later traveled to Peshawar and then back through central and south India, seeing the heavy human costs of Partition in refugee camps for Muslims from the East Punjab and Hindu and Sikh victims of ‘communal trouble’. MacNeice also interviewed everyone from militant separatists in the North West Frontier Province to remnants of the Indian Civil Service. All the while he took notes for the Indian poems that would appear in his 1948 volume Holes in the Sky; left behind a long series of letters detailing his experiences; and gathered the material for three one-hour feature programmes on India and Pakistan to air on BBC radio. It is these radio productions intended for a larger, popular home audience that most pertinently address the workshop’s aims. Specifically, MacNeice presented the Indian Partition in parallel terms to Irish Home Rule and its recent history.
For this project, I have transcribed unpublished and un-catalogued material from the Bodleian Library’s special collections. This includes letters, a general lecture, and the finished BBC radio scripts for “India at First Sight”, “Portrait of Delhi”, and “The Road to Independence”. While the broadcasts themselves date to early 1948, the material was written the previous year and is derived from draft manuscripts dated then. Neither the published poems nor the manuscript materials have been treated to post-colonialist evaluations or other academic consideration, apart from brief mention in John Stallworthy’s biography of MacNeice (Faber & Faber 1995). The material shows clear evidence of an authorial strategy to present the 1947 Partition in analogous terms to the earlier division of Ireland. “India at First Sight” also illustrates a revised notion of India, specifically in the central character’s turn away from Theosophical and imperial ideas of the country and towards its recent history and such contemporary writers as Rabindranath Tagore and Muhammad Iqbal. Taken together, MacNeice’s radio plays develops a ‘layered’ sense of history already familiar to the British public. Memories, landscapes, religious differences, and literary achievement all contribute to the political moment as much as they did in Anglo-Irish experience. Here cultural allegiance to Britain and English literature receives especially sympathetic notice. If MacNeice claims any special authority to treat India, a clear justification rests in his – and ostensibly the public’s – mind: no one would understand a former colony’s independence and its partition so well as an Anglo-Irish writer and reporter who had seen it done before and at firsthand.
