What Filters Through the Curtain

Abstract

This essay argues that the Cultural Cold War is one of the indispensable backgrounds against which the story of modernisms in India must be reconsidered. Using a wealth of unpublished or forgotten documents, it throws light on the ways by which the Cold War shaped the publishing, critical and literary scene in India in the 1950s–1970s, when both blocs were engaged in “pressing the fight” and devising or funding a vast arsenal of “cultural weapons”, such as book programmes, translations and magazines. This background helps to shed light on the “new cultural conversations”, the transnational and translational traffics that were taking place at the time; why and how certain texts and little magazines travelled. By examining in particular the role of two institutions, the ICCF (Indian Committee for Cultural Freedom) and USIS (United States Information Services), as well as pivotal modernist figures such as Nissim Ezekiel, and the editorial stances and choices of English-language journals such as Quest and damn you, the aim is to illuminate some of the “travelling literatures”, the affiliations, rebellions and negotiations which nurtured modernisms in India. “What filters through that curtain is only fit for the international shit-pot” provocatively wrote Adil Jussawalla in 1972, while criticizing the “dreadful dilution” of the literature disseminated by USIS. Many Indian writers also “used” the Cold War (and the worldliness it gave rise to), struggled for the means of political, cultural and literary independence, and defined themselves against the bi-polarization of the world. Bypassing official circuits and dictates, they strove to clear alternative spaces for themselves, to invent their own signature of modernism and define in their own terms the many meanings and forms of “freedom”.