Mixed race

Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy

About: 

Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy was the son of Sir Mutu Coomaraswamy, from Ceylon, and his wife Elizabeth Clay Beeby, from Kent. Coomaraswamy joined Wycliffe College in Gloucestershire in 1889 and then studied Botany at University College London, graduating in 1900. He married Ethel Mary Partridge in 1902 and worked for the Minerological Survey in Ceylon, 1903-6.

In 1910, Coomaraswamy was involved in the formation of the India Society in London - a society dedicated to promoting Indian art. He wrote a number of pamphlets on Indian art and in 1917 took up a position as Research Fellow in Indian, Persian and Muhammadan Art at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.

In 1912, he divorced his first wife. His second wife was Alice Richardson, a performer of Indian music. His third wife was the American artist Stella Bloch, but this marriage was short-lived.

Published works: 

The Deeper Meaning of the Struggle (Broad Campden: Essex House Press, 1907)

The Aims of Indian Art (Broad Campden: Essex House Press, 1908)

The Influence of Greek on Indian Art (Broad Campden: Essex House Press, 1908)

Medieval Sinhalese Art (Broad Campden: Essex House Press, 1908)

The Indian Craftsman (London: Probsthain & Co., 1909)

The Oriental View of Women (Broad Campden: Essex House Press, 1909)

Indian Drawings (London: India Society, 1912)

(with M. E. Noble) Myths of the Hindus and Buddhists (London: George Harrap, 1913)

Buddha and the Gospel of Buddhism (London: Harrap, 1916)

Dance of Siva (New York: Simpkin, Marshall, 1924)

Figures of Speech or Figures of Thought (London: Luzac, 1946)

The Bugbear of Literacy (London: Dennis Dobson, 1949)

Date of birth: 
22 Aug 1877
Connections: 

Laurence Binyon, Stella Bloch (third wife), Walter Crane, Eric Gill, E. B. Havell, Christiana Herringham (India Society), Ethel Mary Mairet (first wife), Margaret Noble, A. R. Orage, Alice Richardson (second wife), T. W. Rolleston (India Society), William Rothenstein, M. J. Tambimuttu (nephew).

Contributions to periodicals: 

Burlington Magazine

Indian Art and Letters

 

Reviews: 

Isis 2.2, September 1919

Indian Magazine and Review 481, January 1911

Secondary works: 

Seaman, G. R., 'Coomaraswamy, Ananda Kentish (1877-1947)', Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004) [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/55201]

Coatts, Margot, ‘Mairet , Ethel Mary (1872–1952)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2007) [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/39639]

Lipsey, Roger, Coomaraswamy, 3 vols (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977)

Livingston, Ray, The Traditional Theory of Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1962)

Mitter, Partha, Much Maligned Monsters: History of European Reactions to Indian Art (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977)

Archive source: 

Letters and notebooks, Cambridge University Library, Cambridge

Correspondence and papers, Princeton University Library, New Jersey

India Society Archives, Mss Eur F147, Asian and African Studies Reading Room, British Library, St Pancras

Stella Bloch Archive, Ms Thr 460, Houghton Library, Harvard College Library, Boston

Stella Bloch Papers, CO822, Princeton University Library, Princeton, New Jersey

Papers and photos, William Morris Hunt Memorial Library, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

 

Involved in events: 
City of birth: 
Colombo
Country of birth: 
Ceylon
Current name city of birth: 
Colombo
Current name country of birth: 
Sri Lanka
Other names: 

AKC

Date of death: 
09 Sep 1947
Location of death: 
Needham, Massachusetts, USA
Date of 1st arrival in Britain: 
01 Jan 1879
Precise 1st arrival date unknown: 
Y
Tags for Making Britain: 

Sehri Saklatvala

About: 

The youngest daughter of Communist politician Shapurji Saklatvala and his English wife Sarah Marsh, Sehri Saklatvala was born in Twickenham in 1919 and grew up in London. Along with her three brothers and sister, Sehri Saklatvala was raised in fairly modest circumstances, despite the family connection with the Tata firm. As a young woman, she became involved with the struggle for Indian independence in Britain. Indian Political Intelligence surveillance files note her presence in 1937 at India League meetings, along with other South Asian and British intellectuals and activists such as Mulk Raj Anand, Dr S. A. Wickremasinghe, Harry Pollitt, and Reginald Sorensen, as well as Krishna Menon. In the early 1940s she was also active, at least for a short while, in the Committee of Indian Congressmen.

Published works: 

The Fifth Commandment: Biography of Shapurji Saklatvala (Salford: Miranda Press, 1991)

Date of birth: 
02 Jun 1919
Archive source: 

Saklatvala Papers, Mss Eur D 1173, Asian and African Studies Reading Room, British Library, St Pancras

Involved in events: 

Meetings of the India League and the Committee of Indian Congressmen

City of birth: 
Twickenham, London
Country of birth: 
England

Location

2 St Albans Villas Highgate Road
London, NW5 1TR
United Kingdom
51° 33' 1.5084" N, 0° 8' 12.2244" W
Dates of time spent in Britain: 

From birth

Aubrey Menen

About: 

Aubrey Menen was a writer, essayist, broadcaster, journalist, drama critic and activist. His work explored the question of nationalism and the cultural contrast between his own Irish-Indian ancestry and his traditional British upbringing. He was born to an Irish mother and an Indian father in 1912 and was brought up in Islington, later moving to Forest Hill, south London. He studied philosophy at University College London (UCL), where he formed his own drama group, and befriended the artist Duncan Grant who introduced him to many members of the Bloomsbury Group, including John Maynard Keynes and Virginia Woolf. He persuaded H. G. Wells to allow him to adapt The Shape of Things to Come, even though Wells had already sold the rights to Alexander Korda. Korda agreed to three closed performances, which caused a sensation. At UCL he was rejected for the Rosa Morrison Bursary by the then Jewish Master of the college on the grounds that he was not of 'pure' English descent.

After graduating in 1932, Menen became the drama critic for The Bookman from 1933 to 1934. He also became involved with Krishna Menon's India League and toured the regions as a speaker. So that he would not be confused with Menon, a friend of his father's, he anglicized his name to Menen. In 1934, Menen, together with the actor Andre van Gysegham, founded the Experimental Theatre, which sought to create a politically engaging theatre in alternative performance spaces. His radical plays regularly ran into difficulties with the Lord Chamberlain and he was sued for blasphemy and obscenity for his 1934 play Genesis II. From 1937 to 1939 he worked as director of the Personalities Press Service. In April 1939 he moved to Bombay, finding work at All-India Radio. During the Second World War, he worked as a script writer and editor for propaganda broadcasts for the Government of India. He also broadcast regularly on the radio and became a leading radio personality in India. He subsequently worked for the advertising agency J. Walter Thompson's film department. In the late 1940s, after the war, he became a full-time writer. He briefly returned to Britain in the autumn 1947 to oversee the publication of The Prevalence of Witches. In 1948 he moved to Italy, to live in what he described as a space midway between India and England. He lived there until 1980. He spent his final years living in Kerala, where he died in 1989.

Menen's output was prolific and covered a variety of genres. Starting his career as a dramatist and critic, he moved to radio journalism. He authored nine novels, several travel books, autobiographical works, essays and reviews. He also published a version of The RamayanaRama Retold, which was banned in India but, despite its radical implications, performed in London amidst some controversy. His fiction is driven by a caustic satire and his essays reveal a passionate desire to break down the falsity of racial myths of 'Aryan' superiority, whether in India amongst Nairs or in Nazi Germany; a similar perspective is evident in relation to the hypocrisy of racial stereotyping in Britain. Menen expresses in his non-fiction the advantage of dual vision: born to Indian and Irish parents, brought up as a brown Englishman in Britain, and in India always a foreigner. This liminality takes on sexual dimensions throughout his autobiographical essays which reflect, despite his conversion to Catholicism, a radical homosexuality.

Published works: 

The Prevalence of Witches (London: Chatto & Windus, 1947)

The Stumbling-Stone, etc. (London: Chatto & Windus, 1949)

The Backward Bride (London: Chatto & Windus, 1950)

The Duke of Gallodora (London: Chatto & Windus, 1952)

Dead Man in the Silver Market: An Autobiographical Essay on National Pride (London: Chatto & Windus, 1954)

Rama Retold (London: Chatto & Windus, 1954)

The Abode of Love: The Conception, Financing and Daily Routine of an English Harem in the Middle of the Nineteenth Century Described in the Form of a Novel (London: Chatto & Windus, 1957) 

The Fig Tree (London: Chatto & Windus, 1959)

Rome Revealed (London: Thames & Hudson, 1960)

SheLa: A Satire (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1963)

Speaking the Language Like a Native: Aubrey Menen on Italy (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1963)

A Conspiracy of Women (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1966)

The Space Within the Heart (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1970)

Cities in the Sand (London: Thames & Hudson, 1972)

Upon this Rock (New York: Saturday Review Press, 1972)

The New Mystics and the True Indian Tradition (London: Thames & Hudson, 1974)

Fonthill: A Comedy (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1975)

(with photographs by Brian Seed) London (Amsterdam: Time-Life Books, 1976)

(with the editors of Time-Life Books and photographs by Brian Seed) Venice (Amsterdam: Time-Life Books, 1976)

Art and Money: An Irreverent History (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1980)

Date of birth: 
22 Apr 1912
Connections: 

Mulk Raj Anand, Z. A. Bokhari, Bertold Brecht, Marc Chagall, Kamala Das (poet and relative), Roger Fry, William Golding, Duncan Grant, Andre van Gyseghem, John Maynard Keynes, Alexander Korda, S. M. Marath, Krishna Menon, Jawaharlal Nehru, Santha Rama Rau, George Bernhard Shaw, Ernst Toller, Gore Vidal, H. G. Wells, Virginia Woolf.

Contributions to periodicals: 

The Bookman

Liliput

Vanity Fair

Secondary works: 

Elias, Mohammed, Aubrey Menen, vol. 7 (Madras: Macmillan, 1985) 

Innes, C. L.,  A History of Black and Asian Writing in Britain, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008)

Nasta, Susheila, Home Truths: Fictions of the South Asian Diaspora in Britain (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002)

Ranasinha, Ruvani, South Asian Writers in Twentieth-Century Britain: Culture in Translation (Oxford: Clarendon, 2007)

Vijayan, K. B., Asvastharaya Pratibhasalikal (Kottayam: Current Books, 1995)

Archive source: 

Private papers and mss, Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center, University of Boston

 

Involved in events: 

Campaigned for the India League as a speaker in the regions

Propaganda broadcasting during the Second World War on All-India Radio

City of birth: 
London
Country of birth: 
England
Other names: 

Aubrey Menon

Location

Charlotte Street Bloomsbury
London, W1T 4LU
United Kingdom
51° 31' 7.3416" N, 0° 8' 6.0612" W
Date of death: 
13 Feb 1989
Location of death: 
Trivandrum, India
Dates of time spent in Britain: 

1912-39, 1947-8

Location: 

Islington, London; Forest Hill, London.

Cedric Dover

About: 

Dover was born in Calcutta to Eurasian parents in 1904. Dover's mixed-race ancestry (English father, Indian mother) and his studies in biology fostered in him a strong concern with ethnic minorities and their exclusion and oppression, as well as their cultural achievements. He studied at St Joseph's College, Calcutta, and Medical College, Calcutta, before joining the Zoological Survey of India as a temporary assistant in charge of entomology, also helping with an anthropometric study of the Eurasian community of Calcutta, writing several scientific articles and editing the Eurasian magazine New Outlook. In 1929 he met Jawaharlal Nehru. After a brief time studying at the University of Edinburgh (zoology and botany) and at the Natural History Museum in London (systematic entomology), he took up various zoological posts in Malaya and India where he also applied his scientific expertise to social welfare problems. 

Dover settled in London in 1934 in order to further pursue anthropological studies on issues of race. Julian Huxley supplied Dover with an early proof copy of We Europeans. This book marked the turning point for Dover's thinking on issues of race and drove him to write Half-Caste. He travelled widely in Europe, lecturing on race and using his scientific knowledge to help dispel the eugenicist myths surrounding race and in particular mixed-race lineage. In Britain Dover also wrote several papers and books about race including Half-Caste and Hell in the Sunshine. He was a firm believer in Indian independence, describing himself as the first Eurasian to ally himself with the struggle for Indian independence. Through these nationalist sympathies he became loosely linked with Krishna Menon and the India League

In the 1940s he was a regular contributor to the BBC Indian Section of the Eastern Service alongside many other Britain-based South Asians such as Mulk Raj Anand, M. J. Tambimuttu and Venu Chitale. He also befriended George Orwell. During the Second World War, he worked in Civil Defence and served with the Royal Army Ordnance Corps. He also found work as a lecturer for the Ministry of Information and edited Three, the journal of No. Three Army Formation College. Furthermore, Dover developed a mosquito repellent, known as 'Dover's Cream', which was widely used by soldiers serving in South and South East Asia. 

In 1947, after the war, Dover moved to the United States where he held a range of visiting academic posts in the field of anthropology and 'inter-group relations', focusing his concern on American minority communities.  His interests extended into the field of visual art, including 'Negro' arts. He was a member of the Faculty of Fisk University, as Visiting Lecturer in Anthropology. He also briefly lectured at the New School of Social Research, New York, and Howard University. During this period, Dover renewed his interest in African American culture. In the 1950s, after the Second World War and his career in the USA, he returned to London. He continued to lecture and contribute to publications on minority issues and culture until his death.

Published works: 

Cimmerii Or Eurasians and their Future (Calcutta: Modern Art Press, 1929)

Know This of Race (London: Secker & Warburg, 1930)

The Kingdom of Earth ( Allahabad: Allahabad Law Journal Press,1931)

Half-Caste (London: Secker and Warburg, 1937)

Hell in the Sunshine (London: Secker & Warburg, 1943)

Feathers in the Arrow: An Approach for Coloured Writers and Readers (Bombay: Padma, 1947)

Brown Phoenix (London: College Press, 1950)

American Negro Art (London: Studio, 1960)

Date of birth: 
11 Apr 1904
Contributions to periodicals: 

Burma Review

Calcutta Review

Congress Socialist

The Crisis

Freethinker

Indian Forest Recorder

Indian Writing

Left Review

Life and Letters Today

Marriage Hygiene

Mother and Child

Nature

New Outlook (editor and publisher)

Our Time

Phylon (contributing editor)

Pictorial Knowledge (associate editor)

Poetry Review

Quarterly Review

Spectator

Three (editor)

Tribune

United Asia

Secondary works: 

Nasta, Susheila, Home Truths: Fictions of the South Asian Diaspora in Britain (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002)

Visram, Rozina, Asians in Britain: 400 Years of History (London: Pluto, 2002)

Involved in events: 

Second World War (served with  Royal Army Ordnance Corps)

City of birth: 
Calcutta
Country of birth: 
India
Current name city of birth: 
Kolkata
Date of death: 
01 Dec 1961
Location of death: 
London
Date of 1st arrival in Britain: 
01 Jan 1934
Precise 1st arrival date unknown: 
Y
Dates of time spent in Britain: 

mid 1920s, 1934-47, 195?-1961

Location: 

Edinburgh, London.

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