Women in Wartime: Venu Chitale’s National Imaginaries as Radio Resistance on the BBC

Abstract

In 1940, the Maharashtrian-born writer Venu Chitale was among the first Indian women recruited by the BBC to broadcast war propaganda programs designed to persuade British and Indian listeners to support Britain’s antifascist efforts. Given that India’s anticolonial nationalists and intelligentsia were ambivalent about supporting their colonizers in a war many felt was not theirs to fight, the BBC enlisted a group of Indian diaspora writers—whose voices listeners in India would find familiar, trustworthy, and persuasive—to present British people and culture in a positive light. This essay examines how Venu Chitale navigated her competing allegiances to Britain’s antifascist activities and India’s anticolonial nationalism when broadcasting pro-British war propaganda programs on the BBC’s Home and Eastern Services. By reading Chitale’s broadcasts through the context of Britain’s vegetarianism and animal welfare movement and her 1950 novel In Transit—which presents the nationalism of Maharashtra’s Chitpawan Brahmin community—I illuminate how Chitale integrates subversive commentary that challenges disempowering colonial stereotypes and misperceptions of Indians into her broadcasts lauding British contributions to the war effort. The immediacy and intimacy of Chitale’s broadcasts into the private homes of her listeners enabled her to position Indian women more inclusively within the national imaginaries of Britain and India. Although Chitale’s strategic performances of authentic solidarity may not appear overtly anticolonial, I contend that her refusal to erase her diasporic identity markers by Anglicizing her speech, dress, or personal values when presenting her programs forces listeners to acknowledge that her allegiance with their cause makes her a citizen equal to themselves and defines her identity as much as her embodied difference. The subversive nature of Chitale’s messaging marks the first stages of a South Asian resistance to anti-immigrant racism that would become increasingly robust in the decades following decolonization.