It's all the Raj

I DIDN'T know much about south Asian writing in London, or anywhere else, when I came to live in England in the early 1970s.

For me, coming from Sri Lanka, London was a fantasy of pop music and pulp fiction - a city peopled by the likes of John Lennon and James Bond. But one day I spotted the life-sized bronze statue of Gandhi, seated cross-legged in Tavistock Square, and it was as though a different history of the city came into focus. I didn't realise until then how one turn of a lens might change a whole scene; hidden figures burst into the frame.

The literary past of London is sometimes remembered a little too selectively. Mulk Raj Anand and Tambimuttu, for example, were very much a part of the pre-war London literary scene, but they rarely appear in the roll call of the period.

Tambimuttu (1915-1983) had come to London from Sri Lanka (Ceylon then). A flamboyant bohemian of Fitzrovia, he founded the magazine Poetry London in 1939 and published some extraordinarily eclectic pages: poets including Dylan Thomas and Stephen Spender alongside such artists as Henry Moore and Graham Sutherland.

Mulk Raj Anand's pioneering first novel, Untouchable, cut by 150 pages on the advice of Gandhi, was published in 1935 after 19 rejections with a preface by EM Forster.

Anand's Conversations in Bloomsbury gives a quirky glimpse of those wavering 1930s circles: "Not exactly an Indian summer, this," Virginia Woolf greets him. They go on to talk about the lowbrow, the highbrow, the goddess Kali, sexual energy and Tantric yoga in Regent's Park.

Leonard Woolf, husband of Virginia, talked to Anand and Forster about A Passage to India. I can imagine Woolf clutching his own novel, Village in the Jungle (1913), set in the south of old Ceylon where he had worked as a young man. A story that he brought back to Bloomsbury which connects the two locations.

It was my elder brother who told me: "If you want to write in London, you should read GV Desani." Desani's one and only novel - a Penguin Modern Classic, All About H Hatterr, published in London in 1948 - was actually written around about the midnight hour of Indian independence, and revels in an infectious heady language that is both old and new. "It was a dam' fine day ... The earth was blotto with the growth of willow, peach, mango-blossom ..."

Celebrated by TS Eliot and, later, Anthony Burgess, its chaotic exuberance puts much of today's wilder writing into perspective.

Fiction in London has always been heterogeneous. If you take the 1950s and widen the lens, you'll see the young VS Naipaul starting out with The Mystic Masseur and A House for Mr Biswas - bringing another kind of dispersed south Asia, settled in Trinidad, fresh into the world of our imagination.

SAM Selvon's Lonely Londoners were also Caribbean but they too had roots, as they said, that spread back to India and beyond. Then Attia Hosain whose quiet, assured short fiction, written in the same period, created a distinctive world out of the years before and after partition.

Michael Ondaatje, who came here from Sri Lanka in 1954, found London too full of the ghosts of literary giants for him to write. He needed to be somewhere else - Canada, it turned out - to produce The English Patient.

Nearly two decades later, I saw fewer forbidding ghosts; I was encouraged by the diversity of writers who wrote here. Long before my first novel, Reef, came out in 1994, I was writing poems and stories.

Then time played another trick on me. I found that Tambimuttu was back in London from New York and had revived his magazine in collaboration with Apple - the Beatles' business. I never met Tambimuttu but he wrote to say he wanted my poems for the next issue.

The first issue, Autumn 1979, had Bob Dylan and Allen Ginsberg. But there was no next issue. The venture folded. My poems disappeared. Then the 1980s began with Midnight's Children running right into a massive Raj revival on screens big and small.

Now the more I look, the clearer I see that borders, frontiers, categories of expediency shift and erode, and often rightly so. Writers, at their best, break boundaries to make something unexpected but true, finding what they need wherever they happen to be.

It is not location but language that we live in when we read.

And when language breaks free from squabbles of ownership, we discover our imaginations have been irresistibly intermingled across the world for a very long time.

. Romesh Gunesekera's novel, Heaven's Edge, has just been published by Bloomsbury in paperback. He will be discussing the contribution of Asian writing to world literature at the Barbican's Midnight's Extended Family on Sunday at 2pm (box office: 020 7638 8891).

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