Mulk Raj Anand Biography

I began to write early—a kind of free verse in the Punjabi and Urdu languages, from the compulsion of the shock of the death of my cousin when she was nine years old. I wrote a letter to God telling him He didn't exist. Later, going through the dark night of another bereavement, when my aunt committed suicide because she was excommunicated for interdining with a Muslim woman, I wrote an elegy. Again, when I fell in love with a young Muslim girl, who was married off by arrangement, I wrote calf love verse. The poet-philosopher, Muhammad Iqbal, introduced me to the problems of the individual through his long poem "Secrets of the Self." Through him, I also read Nietzsche to confirm my rejection of God. After a short term in jail, my father, who was pro-British, punished my mother for my affiliations with the Gandhi Movement. I went to Europe and studied various philosophical systems and found that these comprehensive philosophies did not answer life's problems. I was beaten up for not blacklegging against workers in 1926, in the coal-miner's strike. I joined a Marxist worker's study circle with Trade Unionist Alan Hutt, and met Palme-Dutt, John Strachey, T.S. Eliot, Herbert Read, Bonamy Dobrée, Harold Laski, Leonard Woolf. During that time I fell in love with a young Welsh girl painter, Irene, whose father was a biologist. For her I wrote a long confession about the break-up of my family, the British impact, and my later life. Nobody would publish the narrative. So I began to rewrite portions, as allegories, short stories, and novels. On a tour with Irene, in Paris, Rome, Vienna, Berlin, Brussels, I discovered Rimbaud, Gide, and Joyce. My first attempt at a novel was revised in Gandhi's Sabarmati Ashram in Ahmedabad, but was turned down by 19 publishers in London. The 20th offered to publish it if E.M. Forster wrote a Preface. This the author of A Passage to India did.

Since the publication of this first novel, I have written continuously on the human situation in the lives of people of rejects, outcasts, peasants, lumpen, and other eccentrics, thrown up during the transition from the ancient orthodox Indian society to the self-conscious modernist secular democracy.

I believe that creating literature is the true medium of humanism as against systematic philosophies, because the wisdom of the heart encourages insights in all kinds of human beings who grow to self-consciousness through conflicts of desire, will, and mood. I am inclined to think that the highest aim of poetry and art is to integrate the individual into inner growth and outer adjustment. The broken bundle of mirrors of the human personality in our time can only become the enchanted mirror if the sensibility is touched in its utmost pain and sheer pleasure and tenderest moments. No rounded answers are possible. Only hunches, insights, and inspirations and the karuna that may come from understanding.

The novelist's task is that of an all-comprehending "God," who understands every part of his creation, through pity, compassion, or sympathy—which is the only kind of catharsis possible in art. The world is itself action of the still center. The struggle to relate the word and the deed in the life of men is part of the process of culture, through which illumination comes to human beings. The world of art is communication from one individual to another, or to the group through the need to connect. This may ultimately yield the slogan "love one another," if mankind is to survive (against its own inheritance of fear, hatred, and contempt, now intensified through money-power, or privileges, and large-scale violence of wars) into the 21st century, in any human form.

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Mulk Raj Anand is the champion of the underdog. All his novels deal with the underprivileged sections of Indian society. He was the first Indian novelist to make an untouchable the hero of a novel. Untouchable describes one day in the life of 18-year-old Bakha, who is treated as dirt by all Hindus just because his profession is to clean latrines. Artistically it is the most perfect of Anand's earlier novels. The distinction of Anand's writing lies in capturing Bakha's work ethic—Bakha tackles his odious job with a conscientiousness that invests his movements with beauty. The next novel, Coolie, has a wider canvas and is more diffuse in structure. Munoo, a young orphan, works at a variety of odd jobs at Daulatpur, Bombay, and Simla till he dies aged 15 of tuberculosis brought on by undernourishment. Munoo is exploited not because of caste but because he is poor. Two Leaves and a Bud is about the plight of the laborers in a tea plantation in Assam; the novel fails because Anand's approach is too simplistic; the English owners are shown as unmitigated villains. Anand's next work was a trilogy with the young Lal Singh as hero. The Village is an authentic picture of a typical Punjabi village, and shows the adolescent Lal Singh rebelling against the narrow superstitions of the villagers—he goes so far as to cut his hair, unthinkable for a Sikh. Across the Black Waters shows Lal as a soldier fighting in the trenches of Flanders in World War I; his contact with the French makes him realize that the white races too are human, and not demigods like the British in India. The Sword and the Sickle shows Lal engaged in revolutionary activities in India after eloping with the village landlord's daughter; it is not as well written as the earlier two volumes.

Anand is a prolific writer, and has written a large number of extremely varied short stories. They reveal his gift for humor, and deal in a lighter vein with the problems that engage him in his novels—the exploitation of the poor, the impact of industrialization, colonialism, and race relations. One of Anand's best novels, The Big Heart, deals with the traditional coppersmiths who feel threatened by mechanization. The large-hearted Ananta tries to weld them into a trade union; he tells them that it is not the machines but the owners who exploit them, but he dies in a scuffle before his ideals can be realized.

The Old Woman and the Cow (republished as Gauri) takes up the plight of another underprivileged section of society—women. The heroine, Gauri, is sold to an old money-lender by her own mother out of economic necessity. Gauri re-enacts the Ramayana myth of Sita by staying for some time in the house of the old banker, just as Sita had to stay with Ravana. Gauri is reunited with her husband Panchi just as Sita was reunited with Rama, and Panchi rejects her later, just as Rama rejected the pregnant Sita because of social pressures. At this point, Anand gives a new turn to the old myth: unlike Sita who bore her sufferings meekly, Gauri rejects her cowardly husband and goes on to build a new life for herself. The story is well conceived and the use of the myth original, but the writing is hurried and slipshod, the harangues on social justice not organic to the plot. Private Life of an Indian Prince, a study of a neurotic maharajah, is confused and disorganized; some critics, however, have defended the narrative as a true reflection of the hero's psyche, and consider it Anand's best novel.

Anand is now at work on an ambitious seven-volume autobiographical novel, The Seven Ages of Man. Seven Summers, published more than four decades ago, is a lyrical account of early childhood, primarily from the child's point of view. Morning Face describes the life of the protagonist, Krishan Chander Azad, up to the age of 15, and we get a vivid picture of the brutality that once passed for school-teaching. Confessions of a Lover deals with Krishan's undergraduate days at Khalsa College, Amritsar. The novel is not only a moving human document, it is an authentic account of life in the Punjab in the 1920's, and records the ferment caused by Gandhi's satyagraha. The fourth volume, The Bubble, covers the period 1925-29; it shows Krishan as a student in England, obtaining a Ph.D. degree. He falls in love with Irene Rhys, and pours out his feelings by writing a long novel (just as Anand did in real life). Most of Anand's works have a linear structure, but The Bubble departs from this convention. It is in the form of letters, diary entries, and excerpts from the novel Krishan is writing; it also includes numerous philosophical discussions. The life of an Indian student in England of the time, and particularly Krishan's loneliness, are impressively portrayed. But, like Morning Face and Confessions of a Lover, The Bubble is too long (600 pages). If only the "outpourings" had been sensitively edited, The Bubble would have been Anand's best work, and a triumph in terms of technique.

The forthcoming And So He Plays His Part is the fifth volume of The Seven Ages of Man. Anand observes in his "Afterwords" (sic), "As the forthcoming novel entitled And So He Plays His Part is seven novels in one, I have decided to issue it in parts, beginning with Little Plays of Mahatma Gandhi, as work in progress, symbolic of my departure from the accepted form." This "novel" is in the form of 15 scenes of a drama, framed by a long letter to Irene and a postscript to this letter, and shows the hero Krishan Chaner Azad living in Gandhi's ashram at Sabarmati, working on a novel with an untouchable as hero. All the characters, including historical figures like Gandhi and Subhas Chandra Bose, speak the same bad English, and the exclamation mark seems to be the only punctuation in their speeches. The innumerable mistakes of spelling and grammar (perhaps the printer is to blame) make it difficult for the reader to appreciate Anand's new perspective on Mahatma Gandhi.

Anand attempts to capture the ambiance of Punjabi life by literally translating words and phrases, but this device does not always succeed. Readers outside the Punjab may find it difficult to make anything of phrases like "there is no talk," and "May I be your sacrifice." However, Anand is successful in presenting a vivid picture of the Punjabi peasant and the problems of the poor. The range of his novels is impressive, covering not only the Punjab but life in towns like Bombay and Simla, the trenches of Flanders, and the tea gardens of Assam. His concern for the underdog does not take the form of communism—he is above all a humanist, and his humanism embraces all aspects of life, from contemporary slums to ancient Indian art and philosophy.