A Precursor Of The Arday Case

The Jason Arday case brought to mind a somewhat similar kerfuffle from the 1980s, the Rahila Khan case. In 1986, Toby Forward, a white Church of England cleric from Hull, began submitting fiction under the pseudonym Rahila Khan, an Asian Muslim mother of two. Forward's side of the story is this:

It came as quite a shock when I lost Rahila Khan. I’d known her for two years and we were very close. I told my agent that Rahila wanted to write a letter to the Guardian about a witless piece that they had done about her, but the agent was firm. ‘No. No more Rahila Khan. She’s finished.’ I was upset. We’d done a lot together in just two years.

Rahila Khan and I wrote our first story for BBC Radio at the end of August 1985. We didn’t put my name on it. It was rejected, as not quite suitable, but with an encouraging letter saying that she wrote well and should try sending it to the women’s magazines. We were more pleased than disappointed, so we set to work to write another – after all, the producer had asked her to send something else and had said that they wanted things ‘with a genuine “ethnic” background’ because they didn’t get many. I managed to separate the responses. The failure was Rahila Khan’s; the praise was mine, secretly.

We had found a gap in the market and we set about filling it. All the stories from then on were accepted. The producer said she’d love to see Rahila ‘if she was ever in London’; she was unfailingly kind in her criticism of the stories and patient with revisions. She took a lot of time with us. It was like getting a free writing-course. I was very pleased for Rahila and didn’t mind that my name wasn’t on anything. I liked it better that way.

After a while we tried some stories that weren’t about Asian teenagers, but the producer didn’t like them and sent them back saying they weren’t as good as the others. She didn’t even suggest revision, which was odd. We didn’t know whether there wasn’t room for ‘English’ stories, or if they really weren’t much good, or if the producer just expected Asian themes from an Asian and English themes from a white person.

To test it out, I wrote a story with Tom Dale. It was a country-house murder with a twist at the end. Very English. We sent it to the head of Morning Story to get a fresh opinion, but it landed on the same producer’s desk. To our surprise, she liked it, and it was broadcast. By now, it was getting quite difficult for me, writing some stories with Rahila and some with Tom Dale. We did them on different typewriters and with a different lay-out. When Tom Dale made a mistake – like not keeping a copy of a script that needed revision – the producer told him off quite sharply, not at all the way she wrote to Rahila Khan; and he was never invited to London to meet her. Rahila felt a bit guilty about this and sometimes Tom sulked and wouldn’t write any more stories, but he had to in the end if something English grew in his mind that Rahila couldn’t use.

Another version of the story is here:

In 1987, the feminist publishing house Virago published a collection of stories featuring British Asian girls caught in the conflicting demands of home and school. The author of Down the Road, Worlds Away was a 38-year-old mother of two called Rahila Khan, whose fiction had already been aired on Radio 4. “With hard-eyed realism and poignant simplicity,” the book’s blurb read, “Rahila Khan brilliantly gives voice to uneasy youth.” Virago’s remit, as Lennie Goodings puts it in A Bite of the Apple, was “to publish the stories of women’s everyday lives, stories previously not thought worth telling and recording,” and these tales perfectly fitted the bill.

The problem was that Rahila Khan did not exist. The author of Down the Road, Worlds Away was in reality an Anglican vicar called Toby Forward impersonating an Asian woman. He practised this deception, he said, because vicars were considered sitcom characters and he wanted to be taken more seriously. Forward decided “to let Virago know what had happened and to trust to their good sense, good business and basic humanity,” as he wrote in a confession piece in the London Review of Books. Goodings, who recently stepped down as Virago’s boss after 40 years with the firm, devotes two pages of her buoyant memoir to the fiasco.

“Outraged” by the deception, Goodings ordered all remaining copies of Forward’s stories to be pulped. “I now see this was a little extreme,” she writes. “We could probably have laughed it off—and then pulped his book.” The scandal, which created much hilarity in the press, fed the nation’s anti-feminism and belittled the urgency of Virago’s larger project. But it also stimulated genuine discussion. “Aside from thoughts on racism, lies, and feminism,” Goodings recalls, “a conversation and questions about the text emerged.”

“Does it matter who wrote it if a book is good? Our answer: well, it also depends how you are presenting the book. Question: what about the Brontës—they published under false, male names? Answer: they had to. Question: can you tell the difference between male and female writing? Answer: no. Question: is it true that female writers of colour have an easier ride than white men in getting published? Answer: no, look around you. Question: did the Reverend Toby Forward have the last laugh on the feminists? Answer: nobody agrees on that one! Question: is it okay for a vicar to dissemble? Answer: hmmm...”

Well, of course, Jonathan Swift wasn't just a vicar, he was a dean. According to Wikipedia,

In 1708, a cobbler named John Partridge published a popular almanac of astrological predictions. Because Partridge falsely determined the deaths of several church officials, Swift attacked Partridge in Predictions for the Ensuing Year by Isaac Bickerstaff, a parody predicting that Partridge would die on 29 March. Swift followed up with a pamphlet issued on 30 March claiming that Partridge had in fact died, which was widely believed despite Partridge's statements to the contrary.

In other words, Fr Forward acted in the best traditiona of both English Literature and the Church of England, at least as they were back in the day. What both the Rahila Khan and Jason Arday cases suggest is that in more recent times, the UK bourgeoisie -- especially the university-educated media elite -- has suffered a profound loss of confidence, to the point that they must go on hopeful searches for non-whites who prosper just as they do, with the inevitable result that they wind up being hoaxed.

Let's keep in mind that non-white immigration to England was the project of elites who wanted to keep working-class wages down. This got atarted after World War II, when to make socilalized medicine and nationalized transport affordable, the elites brought in the first waves to work in those fields. Somehow, places like Cambridge and the BBC need to promote a myth of high-achieving writers and academics from immigrant communities -- and inevitably, opportunists find gaps in tbe market.

It's hard to avoid thinking the basic narrative is this: yes, we brought in former colonials to keep wages down, but look at what's come of it! People in these communities are moving into elite professions like media and academics! It's been all to the good!

Jason Arday is nothing new.