Home
People
Organizations
Events
Themes
Oral Histories
Learning Resources
Ravinder Randhawa
Indian-born novelist who founded the Asian Women Writers’ Collective and helped establish the UK’s first refuge for South Asian women facing domestic abuse
Other names
Ravi Randhawa
Place of birth
Date of arrival to Britain
Date of time spent in Britain
1959–
About
Ravinder Randhawa is a novelist, writer, blogger and activist. Born in India to Sikh parents in 1952, she moved to England at the age of 7 when her father secured a job as a factory worker. She was raised in Warwickshire and has been living in London since 2014.
Randhawa’s first novel, A Wicked Old Woman (1987), is widely regarded as a groundbreaking publication and is often cited as the first explicitly British Asian novel. Published at a time when cultural and literary production by British Asian women was scarce, the novel is notable for grounding its characters and their struggles firmly within British life, focusing on a younger generation of British Asian women for whom the idea of ‘returning’ to their ancestral homeland holds little relevance. Initially published by the Women’s Press, the novel was out of print for many years but was republished in 2015 by Matador.
Randhawa is best known for founding the Asian Women Writers’ Workshop in London in 1984, which eventually became the Asian Women Writers’ Collective (AWWC). She managed the day-to-day activities of the AWWC single-handedly for many years. This pioneering group supported several emerging South Asian women writers, including Randhawa herself, Meera Syal, Leena Dhingra, Tanika Gupta and Rukhsana Ahmad, by providing a space for them to find their voice, share their work, develop their skills and access publishers at a time when few such opportunities existed.
In the mid-1970s Ravinder Randhawa became part of a group of Asian and British women from various professional backgrounds who recognized that South Asian women were not receiving adequate support from mainstream domestic violence services. These services frequently lacked staff who spoke relevant mother tongue languages and had sufficient understanding of the cultural pressures involved. In 1979 Randhawa was appointed the first worker for the Asian Women Community Workers Group (AWCWG), where she was responsible for securing funding and premises for what became the first refuge and resource centre in Britain specifically dedicated to Asian women experiencing domestic abuse. The refuge opened in Southwark in 1980, and the initiative later continued under Asha Projects.
Randhawa’s work has been featured on radio and television, including BBC Radio 4 and Sky News. She has written on social and political issues for publications such as the Huffington Post, and her short stories have appeared in international anthologies. She also teaches creative writing and has served as a Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Toynbee Hall, Queen Mary University of London and St Mary’s University.
Rukhsana Ahmad, Leena Dhingra, Rahila Gupta, Tanika Gupta, Meera Syal.
‘India’, in Rosemary Stones (ed.) More to Life than Mr. Right: Stories for Young Feminists (London: Piccadilly Press, 1985), pp. 11–29
‘Sunni’, in Christina Dunhill (ed.) A Girl's Best Friend (London: Women's Press, 1987), pp. 126–36
A Wicked Old Woman (London: The Women's Press, 1987; Kibworth Beauchamp: Matador, 2015)
‘Pedal Push’, ‘The Heera’, ‘Games’ and ‘War of the Worlds’, in Asian Women Writers' Workshop (ed.) Right of Way (London: The Women's Press, 1988), pp. 7–13, 70–83, 120–30, 155–62
‘Mickey Mouse’, in Critical Quarterly 33.4 (1991), pp. 66–74
‘Time Traveller’, in Icarus: New Writing from Around the World 7 (1992), pp. 171–82
Hari-Jan (London: Mantra, 1992)
‘Angel’, in Reading in Focus 3 (Amsterdam: Meulenhoff Educatief, 1993), pp. 5–12
‘Moon Lady’ (BBC Radio 4, 1993) [radio, script produced and read by Randhawa]
‘Hot Patake’ (BBC Radio 4, 1994) [radio, script produced and read by Randhawa]
‘The Maharani's House’, in Rukhsana Ahmad and Rahila Gupta (eds) Flaming Spirit: Stories from the Asian Women Writers' Collective (London: Virago Press, 1994), pp. 80–93
‘Mates’, in Ailsa Cox and Elizabeth Baines (eds) Metropolitan Magazine [Manchester] 5/6 (Winter 1995), pp. 32–5
The Coral Strand (Looe: House of Stratus, 2001)
‘Spinning Top’, in David Morley (ed.) New Writing for the NHS (Devon: Stride Publications, 2002), pp. 111–14
‘Normal Times’, in Wasafiri: Making Tracks 20th Anniversary Issue 42 (Summer 2004), pp. 112–16
See: Ravinder Randhawa blog article contributions, https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/author/ravinder-randhawa
Döring, Tobias, ‘Subversion among the Vegetables: Food and the Guises of Culture in Ravinder Randhawa’s Fiction’, in Beate Neumeier (ed.) Engendering Realism and Postmodernism (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2001), pp. 249–64
Ghosh-Schellhorn, Martina, ‘Navigating the Desh Pardesh of Britain in Ravinder Randhawa’s Novels’, in Heinz Antor and Klaus Stierstorfer (eds) English Literatures in International Contexts (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 2000), pp. 363–72
Michel, Martina, ‘Un(der)-Cover: Randhawa’s A Wicked Old Woman’, Anglistik & Englischunterricht 60 (1996), pp. 143–57
Monteith, Sharon, ‘On the Streets and in the Tower Blocks: Ravinder Randhawa’s ‘A Wicked Old Woman’ (1987) and Livi Michael’s ‘Under a Thin Moon’ (1992)’, Critical Survey 8.1 (1996), pp. 26–36
Reichl, Susanne, ‘Jumbling Up Punjabi, English, Urdu, and Any Other Lingo-bingo’: Transculturality and Different Readers in Ravinder Randhawa’s Hari-jan’, in Ansgar and Vera Nünning (eds) Cultures in the Contact Zone: Ethnic Semiosis in Black British Literature (Trier: Wissenschaftlicher, 2002), pp. 146–59
Reichl, Susanne, ‘Ravinder Randhawa’, in Victoria Arana (ed.) Twenty-First-Century 'Black' British Writers, Dictionary of Literary Biography 347 (Detroit: Gale, 2009), pp. 235–43
See: About, Ravinder Randhawa website, https://ravinderrandhawa.com/about/
See: Ravi Randhawa, Royal Literary Fund website, https://www.rlf.org.uk/writer/ravi-randhawa/
See: Ravinder Randhawa, Troubador Publishing website, https://troubador.co.uk/author/ravinder-randhawa
South Asian Diaspora Arts Archive (SADAA)
Image credit
© Remaking Britain: South Asian Connections and Networks, 1930s – present
Entry credit
Anisah Rahman
