When the African American artist Faith Ringgold’s brilliantly provocative American People Series paintings were rediscovered a few years ago, after being hidden away in storage since the 1960s because of art world uninterest, she found herself belatedly proclaimed a major artistic figure. At 88, she had to wait 60 years for society to catch up with her radical black female genius. Zora Neale Hurston was sadly long dead when her womanist novel Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) was resurrected in the 70s by Alice Walker, after decades out of print. It has been considered a feminist classic ever since. One wonders how many other great works of art, especially from marginalised voices, are underrated or ignored because they were ahead of their time.
The republication of The Nowhere Man (1972) by Kamala Markandaya, who migrated to Britain from India in 1948, is a case in point. It was her seventh novel, but unlike her previous, India-based books, this one put British racism under the microscope, gained no traction with the critics and disappeared from sight until now. Set in 1968, the year of Enoch Powell’s racist rivers of blood speech, the novel centres on Srinivas, an Indian widower and spice merchant who came to England in 1919 and now lives in his own large house in a London suburb. He has experienced the loss of his country and many loved ones. When his Indian wife dies, he becomes friends, and eventually lovers, with Mrs Pickering, a kindly English divorcee.
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