ABSTRACT
Randhawa, Ravinder b. 1952, India writer, activist Ravinder Randhawa is the founder member of the Asian Women Writers' Collective. Her first novel, A Wicked Old Woman (1987), follows Kulwant Singh's escapades as she challenges the Orientalist fantasies of ex-boyfriends and Labour Party comrades, and attacks the complacency of 'yuppie' sons and race-relations officers. Kulwant finally finds community in a group of women who overcome differences as they fight against popular misrepresentations of their South Asian British identities. Randhawa's second novel Han-Jan (1992) provides a comic look at life through the teenage eyes of a British Asian girl, Harjinder Singh, as she tries to outwit her conniving mother,
her 'boyfriend', the maddeningly attractive Suresh and the dastardly duo, V.T. and Shakuntala. Both novels confront issues of race, class and gender, and celebrate inter-racial friendship and romance. Randhawa has also been published in anthologies like A Girl's Best Friend (1988). All Randhawa's fiction mixes colloquial English with smatterings of Hindi slang and references to Anglo-American popular culture, which helps to represent the hybrid identities she celebrates.
