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Mulk Raj Anand (1905-2004) |
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Indian novelist, short-story writer, and art critic, one of the first writers to render Punjabi and Hindustani idioms into English. Called the Zola or Balzac of India, Mulk Raj Anand drew a realistic and sympathetic portrait of the poor of his country. Anand, who was a founding member of the Indian Progressive Writers' Association (PWA), has been regarded with Raja Rao and R.K. Narayan as one the "founding fathers" of the Indian English novel. "And he had soon become possessed with an overwhelming desire to live their life. He had been told they were sahibs, superior people. He had felt that to put on their clothes made one sahib too. So he tried to copy them as well as he could in the exigencies of his peculiarly Indian circumstances." (in Untouchable, 1935) Mulk
Raj Anand was born in Peshawar, the third child of Lal Chand, a
coppersmith and later a military clerk in the British Indian army, and
Ishwar Kaur, a deeply religious peasant woman. The family belonged to
the Kshatriya caste. At the age of nine, while playing with other
children, Anand was hit on his head by a stone, which caused him to
feel physically weak and
oversensitive throughout his boyhood and adolescence. From early on Anand
rebelled against his father's subservience to the British
authorities. His first texts were created as a reaction to the trauma of
the suicide of an aunt, who had been excommunicated for dining with a
Muslim woman. An unhappy love for a Muslim girl, who was married,
inspired some of his poetry. Anand attended Khalsa College, Amritsar,
and entered the University of Punjab in 1921, graduating with honors in
1924. After the Jallianwala Bagh massacre (also known as the Amritsar massacre)
in 1919, Anand went out during the curfew and was arrested by the
police and given seven lashes. "This made me into a political rebel,
against British rule all my life." ('Anand, Mulk Raj,' in World Authors 1950-1970, edited by John Wakeman, 1975, p. 49) Another direct confrontation with the British rule happened after Anand had joined Gandhi's non-cooperation movement. He was involved in the early 1920s in student agitation, received eleven lashes and a short prison sentence. (Literature and Politics in the Age of Nationalism: The Progressive Episode in South Asia, 1932-56 by Talat Ahmed, 2019, p. 54) Moreover, Anand's father turned him along with his mother out of home. Partly in order to avoid further arrests, Anand decided to move to England. His mother pawned her jewellery, and with the support from her and the poet and philosopher Muhammad Iqbal, Anand was able to continue with his studies at Cambridge and at London University, receiving his Ph.D. in 1929. He studied - and later lectured - at League of Nations School of Intellectual Cooperation in Geneva. Although Punjabi and Hindustani were Anand's mother tongues, he wrote in English, because English language publisher did not reject his books due to their themes. Anand began his literary career in England by publishing short reviewes in T.S. Eliot's magazine Criterion. His acquaintances from this time included E.M. Forster, Herbert Read, Henry Miller, and George Orwell, who tried to get Anad a full-time post at the BBC. The most important influence upon Anand was Mahatma Gandhi, who shaped his social conscience. His first novel, Untouchable (1935), Anand finished in Gandhi's ashram on the River Sabarmati at Ahmedabad. Between
1932 and 1945 Anand lectured, on and off, at Workers
Educational Association in London. With other Indian intellectuals, he
launced the Progressive Writers' Association in 1936. Their manifesto
appeared in the February 1936 issue of New Left Review:
"While claiming to be the inheritors of the best traditions of Indian
civilization, we shall criticize, in all its aspects, the spirit of
reaction in our country, and we shall foster . . . everything that will
lead to our country to the new life for which it is striving." (Indian English and the Fiction of National Literature by Rosemary Marangoly George, 2013, p. 31) In 1937 Anand went to Spain to fight on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War. His first wife, the actress Kathleen van Gelder, Anand met in London, where he represented India in the International Writers Conference against Fascism. Anand and Gelder married in 1939 and had one daughter. In the early 1930s Anand focused on books on art history. It
was not until the appearance of the novels Untouchable
and Coolie (1936), the story of a fifteen year-old
child-labourer who dies of tuberculosis, that Anand gained a wide
recognition. Untouchable was selected in Defining Moments in Books: The Greatest Books, Writers, Characters, Passages and Events That Shook the Literary World
(2007), edited by Lucy Daniel. "It is had to imagine that the theorist
behind the Indian Progressive Writers' Association had to endure the
embarrassment of 19 rejections from various British publishing houses .
. . before finally being able to publish Untouchable with Wishart Books." (Ibid., p. 259) Untouchable narrates a day in the life of Bakha,
an unclean outcaste. Bakha is eighteen, proud, "strong and able-bodied," a child
of modern India, who has started to think himself as superior to his
fellow-outcastes. The "touching" occurs in the morning, and
subsequently affects all the following events. Due to his low birth, Bakha's
fate is to work as a latrine sweeper. A symbolic figure, Baksha stands
for all untouchables and their sufferings. The powerful critique of the
Indian caste system suggested that British colonial domination of India
has actually increased the suffering of outcastes, such as Bakha, who
feels that there is a "moral barrier" between human beings. Anand later
recalled, that the book "poured out like hot lava from the volcano of
my crazed imagination during a long weekend. I remember that I had to
finger exercise in order to ease the strain on my right hand. And I
must have slept only six hours in three nights, while writing this
drama." ('The Literary Style of Mulk Raj Anand' by Smruti Ranjan Behera, in The Novels of Mulk Raj Anand: A Critical Study, edited by Manmohan Krishna Bhatnagar, M. Rajeshwar, 2000, p. 95) Edgell Rickword, editor at Wishart Books, agreed to publish the novel on
condition that E.M. Forster provides a preface. "Untouchable
could only have been written by an Indian and by an Indian who observed
from the outside," stated Forster. "No European, however sympathetic,
could have created the character of Bakha, because he would not have
known enough about his troubles. And no Untouchable could have written
the book, because he would have been involved in indignation and
self-pity." (Outside the Fold: Conversion, Modernity, and Belief by Gauri Viswanathan, 1998, p. 222) The 1970 edition of the book was dedicated to reformist
writer K.S. Shelvankar and M.K. Gandhi; the latter also figures as a
character within the story. Originally the manuscript comprised about
1,000 pages, and was rooted in the social conscience of Maxim's Gorky's
story Creatures that Once were Men,
and the aesthetics of James Joyce's Ulysses.
Along with the novelist and short story writer Munshi
Premchand (1880-1936), Anand was involved in forming dalit
literature, used to refer to the "untouchable," casteless sects of
India. His first three novels were banned by the government of Indian.
Being denounced as a "Bolshevik" – at that time all communist
activities were banned in India – he became a target for harassment. In Two Leaves and a Bud (1937), which was withdrawn from the circulation in England too, Anand continued his exploration of the Indian society. The story told about a poor Punjabi peasant. He is brutally exploited in a tea plantation and killed by a British official, who tries to rape his daughter. The socially conscious work shared much with the proletarian novels published in Britain and the United States during the 1930s. Anand's famous trilogy, The Village (1939), Across the Black Waters (1940), and The Sword and the Sickle (1942), was a strong protest against social injustices. The story follows the life of Lai Sing from adolescent rebellion through his experiences in World War I, to his return home and revolutionary activities. In Anand's early novels his social and political analysis of oppression grows clearly from his involvement with the Left in England. In the 1930s and 1940s, Anand divided his time between
literary London and Gandhi's India, but he also fought with the
Republicans in the Spanish Civil War, where he met George Orwell. Anand associated himself with
the British Labour Party and the Indian National Congress.
Joining the struggle for independence, he became an activist of
India League organized by Krishna Menon, who later served as high
commissioner for India. During World War II, Anand worked as a
broadcaster and scriptwriter in the film division of the BBC in London.
At that time Orwell served in the BBC's Far Eastern Service. Orwell had
a remarkably good memory and Anand once said, that he used to
quote lenghty passages from the Book of Common Prayer. After their day was done, the BBC broadcasters, Orwell, Anand, Herbert Read, and others used to go to a pub in Great Portland Street. After the war Anand returned to India, partly because his marriage was ending and partly due to the new future in the Independent India. He stayed in Lahore for a year, and made then Bombay his permanent hometown and center of activity. In 1946 he founded the fine-arts magazine Marg at the advice of Anil de Silva, a young journalist from Bangalore. Anil was also a founder member of the Indian People's Theatre Association. Breaking her promise to marry him and marrying a Frenchman, with whom she went to Paris, Anand suffered a nervous breakdown and was nursed back to healt by a Greek dancer. From her suggestion Anand wrote Private Life of an Indian Prince (1953), in which he focused more on human psyche and personal struggles than on class conflicts. The story had its origins in the betrayal. From 1948 to 1966 Anand taught at Indian universities. He became a director of Kutub Publishers and was busy in attending or organizing many national and international conferences. In the 1960s he served as Tagore Professor of Literature and Fine Art at the University of Punjab and visiting professor at the Institute of Advanced Studies in Simla (1967-68). Between the years 1965 and 1970 Anand was fine art chairman at Lalit Kala Akademi (National Academy of Arts). In 1970 he was appointed president of Lokayata Trust, for creating a community and cultural center in the village of Hauz Khas, New Delhi. After divorce in 1948, Anand married Shirin Vajibdar, a distinguished dancer. Anand's daughter Sushila from his first marriage became a writer, too. Since the 1950s, Anand intermittently worked on a projected seven-volume autobiography, entitled Seven Ages of Man, in which he appeared under the name Krishan Chander. The work was inspired by lines from Shakespeare's play As You Like It: "All the world's a stage / And all the men and women merely players: / They have their exits and their entrances; / And one man in his time plays many parts, / His acts being Seven ages." From the project appeared Seven Summers (1951), set in Punjab, Morning Face (1968), dealing with the period from the beginning of WW I to the Jallianwala Bagh Massacre in 1919, Confessions of a Lover (1976), about Krishan's years at Khalsa College, and The Bubble (1984), in which Krishan encounters an art student named Irene Rhys. The fifth part, entitled as And So He Plays His Part, was planned to be seven novels in one. The first was Little Plays of Mahatma Gandhi (1991), in which Krishan lives in Gandhi's ashram at Sabarmati and works on a novel. Anand also published works on subjects as diverse as Marx and Engels in India, Tagore, Nehru, Aesop's fables, the Kama Sutra, erotic sculpture, and Indian ivories. Conversations in Bloomsbury (1981) contained fictionalized reminiscences of such writers as T.S. Eliot, D.H. Lawrence, E.M. Forster, Aldous Huxley, and Virginia Woolf. Anand portrayed himself as an uncertain young man, whose feelings of superiority occasionally flashes out. "And though I kept my reactions in control, I was impetuous enough to dare and argue with Mr T.S. Eliot, author of the existentialist poem The Waste Land, who had declared himself a Royalist and Anglo Catholic, and who backed Kipling's jingoist 'White Man's Burden'". ('Preface to the Second Edition' by Mulk Raj Anand, 2011, p, 21) A new revised edition of the book, edited by Saros Cowasjee, was published in 2013. Mulk Raj Anand died in Pune on September
28, 2004. He was cremated with full state honours. Some years before
his death, Anand wrote his own obituary, saying self-mockingly that the
"fellow
cannot be denied a certain amount of virtuosity. But it was this very
flair for turning his hand to philosophy, politics, writing, stage,
film, dance choreography, cookery as well as poetry, that was the most
dangerous thing about him." (Mulk Raj Anand: A Reader: Selections from His Fictional and Non-Fictional Writings, edited with an introduction by Atma Ram, 2005, p. xxxi) For further reading: The Aesthetic Cold War: Decolonization and Global Literature by Peter J. Kalliney (2022); Eurasia Without Borders: The Dream of a Leftist Literary Commons, 1919-1943 by Katerina Clark (2021); 'The End of Empire: Mulk Raj Anand's Comparative Modernisms,' in Radio Empire: the BBC's Eastern Service and the Emergence of the Global Anglophone Novel by Daniel Ryan Morse (2020); Oppression and Humiliation: A Study of the Selected Works of Mulk Raj Anand, Arundhati Roy and Chinua Achebe by Md. Manirul Islam (2020); 'Revisiting Class in Mulk Raj Anand's Untouchable: Postmodern Reflections' by Golam Gaus Al-Quaderi and Sheikh Nahid Neazy, in Multicultural and Marginalized Voices of 'Postcolonial Literature, edited by Varun Gulati and Garima Dalal; foreword by Shirley R. Samuels (2017); Indian English and the Fiction of National Literature by Rosemary Marangoly George (2013); Mulk Raj Anand and Dalits by P.K. Singh (2012); Mulk Raj Anand: From Literary Naturalism to Hopeful Humanism by J.C. Marak (2010); Exploitation of Downtrodden: Mulk Raj Anand's Coolie & Untouchable by Kiran Kamboj (2009); Indian Legendary Writers in English: Mulk Raj Anand, R.K. Narayan and Raja Rao, ed. by Jaydeep Sarangi (2009); The Novels of Mulk Raj Anand: A Critical Study, edited by Manmohan Krishna Bhatnagar, M. Rajeshwar (2000); The Indian Imagination: Critical Essays on Indian Writing in English by K.D. Verma (2000); Mulk Raj Anand: A Revaluation by P. Rajan (1994); Mulk Raj Anand, His Art and Concerns: A Study of His Non-Autobiographical Novels by C.S. George (1994); Studies in Indian and Anglo-Indian Fiction by Saros Cowasjee (1993); The Novels of Mulk Raj Anand, ed. by R.K. Dhawan (1992); The Wisdom of the Heart by M. Fisher (1985); Mulk Raj Anand by by G. Packham (1979); The Yoke of Pity by A. Niven (1978); So Many Freedoms by S. Cowasjee (1977); Coolie: An Assessment by S. Cowasjee (1976); 'Anand, Mulk Raj,' in World Authors 1950-1970, edited by John Wakeman (1975); Mulk Raj Anand by M. Berry (1971); Mulk Raj Anand by M.KL. Naik (1968); The Elephant and the Lotus by J. Lindsay (1965) Selected works:
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