"Making Friends": The Geopolitics of the Interview on the BBC'S Eastern Services

Abstract

Indian novelists Mulk Raj Anand's and Attia Hosain's BBC broadcasts explore how the literary radio interview simulates intimacy. Anand's interviews function as explicit wartime propaganda displaying friendship between Britons and Indians while Hosain's postwar interviews portray Britain's hospitality extended to the immigrant. Anand and Hosain participated in the BBC's ideological projects while also challenging the friendship rhetoric of the radio interview.