Mithyl Banymandhub
“…I did stick to the novel form more or less, as an imaginative reinterpretation of Indian life rather than use it as a vehicle to sermonize. And the posing of the problems of human beings in the 30’s by people like Malraux, Celine and Hemingway gave the necessary sense of discrimination to my own treatment of the predicament of our people as against the European view…….,” writes Mulk Raj Anand in a letter to Saros Cowasjee dated February 29, 1968 from Bombay. Mr. Cowasjee was awarded a Canada Council leave scholarship (1968-69) to do research on Mulk Raj Anand’s works. 
People of my generation can recall that Mulk Raj Anand visited Mauritius. He came to the Mahatma Gandhi Institute where I was teaching with the well-known music director, Ravi, and addressed a gathering in the auditorium after requesting the maestro to interpret a song.
This was my encounter with the renowned author whose books I had perused during my student days. The interest he had elicited in my young mind became a passion with the passage of time with the result that I read some of his works and what the critics – and there are many of them – had to say about his style, characters and themes. Mulk Raj Anand is a prolific writer. It can be said to his credit that no one can afford to be indifferent to the man and his writings.
A New Social Order
Mulk Raj Anand was born on December 12, 1905, in Peshawar in North- West India, the son of a coppersmith, Lal Chand Anand, in Amritsar. He joined the British Indian Army later. His mother, Ishwar Kaur, came from Central Punjab and belonged to the peasantry. At the cost of strenuous efforts Lal Chand Anand rose to the position of Head Clerk. Ishwar Kaur was a loving mother who fed her son’s inborn imaginative power with mythological fables and folk tales. She was deeply religious but her religious practices did not impress her son. After the demise of his pretty cousin and playmate. Kaushalya, at the age of nine- ‘the first important crisis of his life’ – Mulk Raj Anand started entertaining serious doubts about religion which in due course turned him into an atheist, undermining his faith in established institutions. With the deep compassion for fellow human beings inherited from his mother, Anand set out in quest of a new social order which would ensure justice, freedom and hope to them.
He was hypersensitive by nature and became physically weak due to recurrent critical diseases. He was often ignored by his playmates who considered him a weakling. Though he developed a complex as a result of this, it was a blessing in disguise since it resulted in an aloofness conducive to contemplation and undistracted observation.
Locke, Berkeley, Hume and Russell
Anand studied at Khalsa College and obtained his B.A. (Hons) degree from the Punjab University. He then travelled to London to do research in Philosophy under the guidance of Professor Dawes Hicks. He was awarded the Ph.D. degree in 1930 for his thesis on the thought of Locke, Berkeley, Hume and Russell.
On his return to Bombay he started the Modern Architects and Artists’ Research Group and the art magazine Marg, in 1946. He became a nervous wreck when the girl he was in love with married someone else and was gradually nursed back to health by a Greek dancer, Melpo. He later married Shirin Vajifdar.
During his stay abroad, Mulk Raj Anand befriended many celebrities. Bonamy Dobree introduced him to T.S. Eliot. He frequently contributed to Centurion which Eliot edited. Herbert Reed helped him with his creative writing by providing valuable suggestions. Renowned literary figures like D.H. Lawrence, E.M. Forster, Dylan Thomas, Lowes Dickinson, Eric Gill and Anand Coomaraswamy inspired him.
His life and writings testify to his participation and achievement in fields as different as fiction, journalism, editorship, publishing, the academic profession, art, philosophy, literary criticism, oriented studies, drama, film, radio, politics, social welfare, administration. His most ambitious mode of expression, however has been fiction.
His novels which are known to me in order of publication are Untouchable (1935), Coolie (1936), Two Leaves and a Bud (1937), Lament on the Death of a Master of Arts (1939), The Village (1939), Across the Black Waters (1940), The sword and the Sickle (1942), The Big Heart (1945), Seven Summers (1951), Private Life of an Indian Prince (1953), The Old Woman and the cow (1960), The Road (1961), Death of a Hero (1963) and Morning Face (1968).
In a letter dated October 23, 1965 to Dr. S. C. Harrex of Flinders University, South Australia, he writes, “I believe the Indian Universalist attitude enables a writer to comprehend the problem of the individual, at least symbolically from anywhere, because of the sanctions in the human centre”.
It is necessary to distinguish in the corpus of his works both quality and quantity and also clarity from vagueness to establish precisely what universalist attitudes and individual problems are presented in his novels and whether he convincingly achieves a sense of human and moral proportion. As a result, one can both appreciate Anand’s contribution to the development of the Indian sociological novel in English and evaluate that contribution from a critical angle.
The Travails of the Common Man
The first aspect to be considered is Anand’s prolificacy. The bulk of his fiction – its social, historical and geographical range – conveys in “crowded background colours and human detail the epic vastness of India, particularly at the proletarian level”. Anand has written on a variety of Indian themes, many of which he pioneered. Among his major preoccupations are caste, poverty, the travails of the common man as peasant, coolie, untouchable, artisan or soldier, the social basis of evil and the human potentialities for love, compassion and whatever is good.
In the words of R.T. Robertson, “Untouchable is the best example we have in commonwealth literature of the archetype of the conflict between society and the individual who is trying to free himself from it”.
At the Sabarmati Ashram
Anand is undoubtedly writing a message for his own culture in Untouchable. Much of the novel provides a contrast of the innate decency of Bakha with “the gap between the protestation and practice of untouchability among caste Hindus in India mainly in the hypocrisy of the priest who claims Bakha’s sister had defiled him” when this is not the case. Anand also contrasts the rigidity of Hindu beliefs with humane relations which can develop casually between the Harijans and other lesser breeds without the law.
In the story of my Experiment with a White Lie in which he explains how Untouchable came to be written, Anand mentions that he modelled Bakha on an untouchable boy he remembered from his childhood. He took the draft of the novel to Gandhi in 1932, because of the stand the Mahatma had taken on the question of untouchability. He spent some time at the Sabarmati Ashram in Ahmedabad in 1929 where he redrafted Untouchable. There, Anand also cleaned the latrines and realized that the “spiritual” experience of the Gandhi Ashram had to be communicated in his novel. A Gandhi rally, where Bakha listens with passionate interest and partial understanding to Gandhi advocating the eradication of the curse of untouchability, provides the climax of Anand’s first novel. The plot comes full circle with Bakha feeling a new destiny stirring within him.
Untouchable thus not only represents the first significant attempt by an Indian who uses English as his medium of expression to portray the outcaste realistically but it also anticipated the impact of Gandhiism and Nehru socialism were to make on the socially conscious writers of a subsequent generation.
Bakha is prototype of thousands of untouchables in India as he represents the agony and anguish, the misery and frustration of those miserable human beings Frantz Omar Fanon, the psychiatrist, has aptly referred to as “the wretched of the earth”.
Encounter with Reality
In Coolie (1936) Anand shows his concern for the neglected, despised and maltreated poor. Munoo, a poor orphan boy from the hills, who is innocent, underfed and ill-treated by his aunt, leaves his native village to find work and see the world. His dreams are shattered by his first encounter with reality. He is employed in the house of bank clerk. He amuses and entertains his employer’s daughter by dancing like a monkey. He is stopped by the housewife who ruthlessly destroys his happiness and makes him realize his position in the world. “He had no right to join the laughter of his superiors. He was to be a slave, a servant who should do the work, all the odd jobs, someone to be abused and beaten….”.
He escapes to work in a pickle factory in Daulatpur where a dispute between the two partners leaves him desolate, unprotected and helpless. He is exasperated by the frantic competition and cunning among the other workers and considers himself a complete failure in the job of a market porter. The generous but feckless Prabha, Munoo’s protector and surrogate father, is betrayed by a cruel Paranoiac foreman, harried by a retired Judge, Sir Todar Mal, and is finally nearly beaten to death by the police acting with habitual brutality.
Munoo is stowed away to Bombay thanks to the elephant “driver” of a circus. He starts working in the Sir George White Cotton Mills and is brutally exploited like the other workers. He lives in a slum. The miserable life of the workers and families, their squalor and exploitation are vividly described. Shocked and bewildered, Munoo is the victim of an accident involving a car driven by Mrs. Mainwaring. He is taken to Simla to work as a page and rickshaw puller. Overwork and undernourishment gradually affect his health until he dies of consumption.
The Cruelty of the System
Anand’s criticism is directed towards society as a whole. In his introduction to Coolie (Orient Paperbacks) Saros Cowasjee refers to it as one responsible for such “prejudice and selfishness and cruelty”.
Deeply moved by the abject poverty in the subcontinent, Anand wanted to write an angry bitter book to appeal to the conscience of his readers. It emerged as “an anguished cry, an indictment of the cruelty of the system, and a declaration of pity for the hero, the betrayed and depraved Munoo. It is more than a social documentary, more than a tract for the times,” writes H.M. Williams in “Studies in Modern Indian Literature in English”.
The Passionate Conscience
Untouchable and Coolie were particularly in harmony with the prevailing English Literary mood. They were translated in various languages and were republished by Penguin Books in 1944. Both novels display most of the characteristics of the age of concern-socio-economic crisis, a crusading leftist spirit, an evangelism of social upheaval and humanitarianism.
Robin skelton’s description of the temper of commitment of the writers of the Thirties as “a movement of the passionate conscience” applies equally well to the tradition of the novel Anand brought to Indian Writing in English and to which novelists like K. A. Abbas, Bhabani Bhattacharya, Khushwant Singh and Kamala Markandaya have subsequently contributed.
Bibliography
- Harrex, S.C. The Fire and the Offering: The English Language Novel of India 1935-1970. 1, Calcutta: Writers Workshop, 1977.
- Paul, Premila. The Novels of Mulk Raj Anand-A Thematic Stud New Delhi. Sterling Publishers Private Limited, 1983.
- Coswajee, Saros. Author to Critic-The letters of Mulk Raj Anand to Saros Coswajee. Calcutta: Writers Workshop, 1973.
- Asnani, Shyam M. Critical Response to Indian English Fiction. Delhi-110035: Mittal Publications, 1985.