Media Diversified
Foregrounding marginalised voices
Kavita Bhanot grew up in London, lived for many years in Birmingham, then moved to India, where she directed an international literature festival, worked as an editor for India’s first literary agency and set up and ran a guest house in Himachal Pradesh. Having spent some years in Manchester (she recently completed a PhD at Manchester University, in Creative Writing and Literature) she now lives between UK and India. Her short stories and non-fiction have been published in anthologies, magazines and journals, two of her stories have been broadcast on BBC Radio 4, and she is the editor of the short story collection Too Asian, Not Asian Enough (Tindal Street Press, 2011). She is a reader with The Literary Consultancy. Kavita has, over the last fifteen years, been working with writers in the UK and South Asia, as mentor and editor, as well as through organising events, workshops, reading/writing groups and conferences around the politics of reading, writing and representation. Her focus, through these events, through academic research, through social media, and in her fiction and non-fiction, has particularly been on punjabiyat, ideology and white, upper class/caste and male supremacy in ‘British Asian’ literature.
A lifetime of being othered due to skin colour, race, religion, takes a toll on the psyche; instilling shame, inferiority, and self-loathing. This can lead people of colour, including film-makers, writers, and other artists to seek purer, more beautiful alternative worlds. However as Kavita Bhanot and Ayesha Manazir Siddiqi discuss ‘Everyone wants to imagine themselves… Read More
In January 2014 we asked 10 writers on their opinions for terms and classifications used to describe traditionally marginalised people in the West. These were collected in our article series ‘Ethnic Minority? No, Global Majority’, Parts One and Two. Since then the debate has raged on both sides of the pond. The term ‘political blackness’… Read More
by Kavita Bhanot Over the last few weeks, a growing number of writers and activist groups have been protesting the sponsorship of the upcoming London Jaipur Literature Festival (JLF) by the notorious metals and mining company Vedanta. An open letter, calling for boycott of the festival by participating writers, has been signed by over a hundred… Read More
by Kavita Bhanot Since the recent failure of World Book Night to include any writers of colour in its 2015 list, there has been a fresh bout of conversation about the need for more ‘diversity’ in the literature that is published and awarded in Britain, as well as amongst those working in publishing. Alongside a… Read More
by Kavita Bhanot First published in Asia Literary Review Over the last two decades, in part due to the success of a small number of novels, plays, films, music albums and television shows, the term ‘British Asian’ has emerged as an identity marker associated with the cultural practices of second-generation South Asian immigrants, born and/or… Read More
Media Diversified 
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