UNIT 2 LIFE AND WORK OF MULK RAJ ANAND

Structure

Objectives
Introduction
Early Life
Literary Career
Literary Awards
The Thirties Movement
The Writing and Publication of llntouchable
Let Us Sum Up
Questions
Suggested Reading

1.0 OBJECTIVES

The objective of this unit is to introduce you to the life and work of the pioneer
Indian English novelist Mulk Raj Anand. Also a section of the unit is devoted to the
Thirties Movement which greatly influenced the writing of Anand. The unit also
deals in detail with the circumstances in which Anand's first novel Untouchable was
written and published.

2.1 INTRODUCTION

In the preceding unit of this Block we have given you a bird's eyeview of the rise of
the Indian English novel from the very beginning till the turn of the millennium. lr.
this unit we shall discuss Mulk Raj Anand who, with R.K. Narayan and Raja Rm:
established Indian English novel in the gamut of Indian and world literatures.
Anand's life may be divided into three periods, according to the place of his residence
and activity: (a) the early years in India until his departure for England 1905- 1925;
(b) the years in Europe, 1925-1945; and (c) the later years in India, 1945, until the
present. This division corresponds to the different stages of his literary career.
first period reveals the various strands and influences that shaped his mind and latcr
came to bear upon his writing. The second period is concerned with Anand's hard
struggle to become a novelist- and the eventual success that he got. The third period
reveals his achievements in the social and cultural life of India.

- -

2.2 EARLY LIFE

Mulk Raj Anand was born in a Hindu family of Kshatriyas on 12 December 1905 in
Peshawar, the central city of Northwest Frontier Province, now in Pakistan. He was
the third of five sons of La1 Chand, a silversmith turned sepoy. Anand's father
belonged to the Thathiar caste. People of Thathiar caste were workers of copper and
silver. Lal Chand left his hereditary occupation to attend school. He learnt English,
took a British military examination and served in cantonments including Sialkot.
Ferozepur, Peshawar, Mian Mir, Nowshera and Malakhand. He was appointed a
head clerk, attached to the Thirty-eighth Dogra Regiment. He was said to be the only
literate man in the whole regiment. He was a worldly man, highly ambitious for his
sons' education and economic status. As an Arya Samaji, Anand's father also served
 as president of the Nowshera Samaj from 1910 to 1913. ~ s ' t h society e incurred the
Untouchable
hostility of the British Officials for its rebellious activities, Lal, fearing the
displeasure of his superiors and the British rulers in India, withdrew from the group
Mulk Raj Anand inherited from his father a professional artisan's industry and minute
attention to detail a s also the revolutionary temperament.

Mulk Raj Anand (1905-)

Anand's mother came from a devout Sikh peasant family of Sialkot. a part of Central
Punjab. She was a religious woman who had a great faith in orthodox beliefs. She
had a vast knowledge of folk tales, having heard them in her childhood from her own
mother, as also legends, fables, myths and other narratives of gods, men, birds and
beasts. "So sure was my mother's gift for storytelling," says Anand, "that sometimes
I found myself rapt in her tales with an intensity of wonder." .

The first twenty years of Anand's life seem to have been spent in the Punjab area
After passing his matriculation in 1920, Anand entered Khalsa College, Amritsar. He
joined non-violent struggle against the British government and courted arrest. His
early recollections focus on two cantonments, Mian Mir and Nowshera In 1925. he
graduated from Punjab University with Honours in English. The first break in
Anand's life came when he received a scholarship for research in philosophy under
Professor Dawes Hicks in London. It is here that he started creative writing. In
1926, he completed dissertation on the thought of great philosophers: John Locke.
George Berkeley, David Hume and Bertrand Russell. In- 1928, he was awarded Ph D
degree by London University. He then associated with T.S. Eliot's literary periodical
The Criterion.

2.3 LITERARY CAREER

Mulk Raj Anand enjoys the reputation of being a pioneer novelist because of a corpus
of creative fiction of sufficient bulk and quality. He is a prolific writer and is
continuing to write and publish at the age of ninety-six. Besides novels and short
stories, he has written a number of books on art, paintings and literature.

Anand became an exciting name with his early novels untouchable (1935),
Coolie(1936) and m o Leavesand a Bud (1937) in which he started the new trend of
realism and social protest in Indian English fiction. In his novels, he portrays the1
doomed lives of the downtrodden and the oppressed. His protagonists-a sweeper, a
coolie, a peasant - are all victims of exploitation, class- hatred, race-hatred and Life and Work of
inhuman cruelty. Over the years, h a n d has become a vigorous champion of the Mulk Raj Anand
oppressed and the downtrodden.

Untouchable, a powerful novel, can be regarded as quintessential Anand since it

projects most of his characteristic concerns and fundamental issues of life. The main
theme of the novel is untouchability as a problem in Hindu society.

In 1939-1942, h a n d wrote a trilogy, a series of three novels dealing with the same
protagonist called La1 Singh. The novels were titled The Village (1939), Across
Black Waters ( 1940) and The Sword and the Sickle (1942).

In 1951, he published Seven Summers, the first of a'series of seven novels which
anand planned to write as a kind of autobiography in seven parts, corresponding to
the seven stages of a man's life as described by Shakespeare in his play As Yozc Like
It. Morning Face, the second of the seven novels in the series, was published in 1968
and received the Sahitya Akademi Award for 1971. This has been followed by
Confession o f a Lover (1976), Bubble (1984), Little Plays ofMahatma Gandhi (1990)
and Nine Moods of Bharata ( 1999).

Besides novels, Mulk Raj h a n d has written more than seventy short stories which
have been published in various collections entitled The Lost Child and Other Stories
(1934), The Barber's Trade Union and Other Stories (1944). Corn Goddess and
Other Stories (1947), ReJections on the Golden Bed and Other Stones (1953), The
Power of Darkenss and Other Stones (1959), Lajwanti and Other Stones (1966) and
Between Tears and Lnzcghter (1973). In addition, he has retold older Indian tales in
two collections: Indian Fairy Tales (1946) and More Indian Fairy Tales (1961).

2.4 AWARDS

In 1952, h a n d was awarded the Internatioilal Peace Prize of the World Peace
Council for promoting peace among the nations through his literary works. In 1967,
he was awarded the Padma Bhushan by the President of India for disticguished
service to art and literature. In 1978, he Non the E.M. Forster award of Rs.3000 for
his novel Confession o f a Lover which was adjusted the best book of creative
literature in the English Language.' This was the first annual award instituted by MIS
Arnold Heinemann.

2.5 THE THIRTIES MOVEMENT

"Among the Indo-English novelists," observes h n i a h Gowda, "Mulk Raj Anand is

the most conspicuously committed writer.. . Perhaps the best word for it is the
plainest: it is propaganda writing."' The Propaganda novel in the true sense is one so
dominated by its author's ulterior purpose that the propaganda cannbt be ignored, and
normally one who dislikes that line of propaganda would find the book unreadable.
Such a novel, Gowda opines, cannot rank among the great works of literature. In a
similar vein, Chetan Kamani complains of the extra-literary intentions of the novelist:
"The trouble with Anand is that he is not able to hide his proletarian sympathies "2
These 'determined' detractors of Anand, and some others, charge him of having used
the artistic medium of the novel for pure propaganda. Indoctrination, they hold, does
not go with the creative process and aesthetic experience.

Anand is not deterred by such-criticism: "I do not in the least mind criticism, even
Untouchable already been rewarded by the fact that they have gone into so many languages of the
world in spite of their truffilness and exposure of many shams, hypocrisies and
orthodoxies of 1ndia."3

This is true, for in his fiction Anand was heeding his artistic conscience than
following any pre-conceived formula. And that accounts for the abiding appeal of his
novels.

Untouchable, as also some other early writings of Anand, cannot be fully appreciated
unless studied in relation to the movement of the nineteen-thirties in Western Europe.
For, as a writer he was shaped in the Thirties when several problems bogged the
intellectuals. The problem that Anand "tried to face as a writer was not strictly a
private, but a private-public problem."4 As it was, he found it impossible to maintain
aloofness from politics in the post-World War Europe.

Anand stayed in London for over two decades, from 1924 to 1945; he was therefore
deeply influenced by the Progressive Movement in literature that flourished in the
Thirties. In London, Anand came under numerous literary, political and social
influences and it is in them that the sources of his synthesis of Marxist and humanist
thought can be seen. "You will find that amorphous as my books are," writes Anand,
"I did stick to the novel form, more or less, as an imaginative interpretation of Indian
life rather than use it as a vehicle to sermonize. And the posing of the problems of
human beings in the 30s 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."5 He was an overt nationalist and championed
the socialist cause in his fiction in common with many European and American
writers of the day.

The peculiar conditons during the early decades of the century in Europe and
elsewhere put a great pressure on the writers to sympathize with the social cause.
The complacency following the First World War, based on the erroneous belief that '

the League of Nations was going to preserve peace and security, was suddenly
exploded, leaving a feeling of loss and disenchantment. There was complete erosion
of human values.

Another event that had a profound influence on writers like h a n d was the General
strike of 1926 in the Great Britain. It made people conscious of the class war
between haves and ha-re-nots in modem civilization. On his amval in England,
Anand had admired Britain for her achievements in science and technology. Living
through the strike, this illusion of his was shattered with a bang. He increasingly
came to realize that the scientific and technological discoveries if controlled bq a
select band of people need not result in social benefits. "And it was no use
speculating on the beneficence of science," avers h a n d , "if its discoveries were to be
manipulated to their own advantage by a small group of individuals who controlled
the key industries and had an absolute say in matters of domestic and foreign policy."

The object of the General Strike was to attain specific rights for the mine workers, in
a way it was a proletarian challenge to the government and its capitalist bias. Anand
and a group of his colleagues sided with the workers; they felt dismayed at the fallure
of the strike. The strike had revealed the reactionary character of the English State
"that it could put back human progress for a thousand years."7 Anand felt convinced
"that the people of Britain, no less than the people of India, had yet to win thelr
liberty."

After the destruction wrought by the First World War, European society had plunged
anew into the shadows of economic depression and cynical mood. The econon~ic
depression caused disastrous effects; it gave rise to unemployment that brought in its
fold unending distress and appalling misery.
The rise of Fascism in Italy under Mussolini and the Nazi power in Germany in 1933 Life and Work of
under Hitler reflected the paralysis of the Western democracies. The Japanese Mulk Raj Anand
aggression on Manchuria in 1931, the Italian conquest of Ethiopia in 1935, the
extinction of Spanish Republic at the hands of Germany and Italy in 1936-37, all in
succession tolled the death knell of the league of Nations.

Such a distintegrating world disillusioned the intellectual of the day; he strove for a
commitment that would restore order and save his world from the existing chaos.
The writer was not only absorbing the atmospehre as a participant but also seemed
readily inclined to reflect it in his writing.

Alarmed at the situation the intellectuals of the West prominently led by Maxim
Gorky of Russia, Romain Rolland of France, Thomas Mann of Germany, and E.M.
Forster of England assembled in Paris in 1935. They raised the voice of liberty as
Shelley and Dickens had done in their own times. "I want greater freedom for
writers," declared Forster, "both as creators and critics for the . . maintenance of
~ulture."~ He appealed to the writers to be courageous and sensitive to fulfil their
public calling; he urged them to come forward and arouse the people to act and
struggle for creating a just and humane society. Tl~econference was dominated by
the writers with a soc~alistbackground, or having some affiliation with communism
They posed a premonition of a threatening situation, caused by the aggressive
imperialism of the day. The psychology working in the background was the moving
force that impelled the writers to use their talents against fascism and write for the
working classes.

Inspired by these ideas some Indian students studying in England assembled in

London a k w months after the Paris Conference and formed the Progressive Writers
Association. Their meetings were attended and occasionally addressed by Ralph Fox,
Karnford and Caudwell. They fiamed a mamfesto of the Association, which was
finalized, amongst others by Mulk Raj Anand and Sajjad Zaheer.

Sajjad Zaheer who played a prominent role in the organization vividly recalls his
association with Anand: "I have had the good fortune of having known Mulk.. .since
1930, when we were both young and in our twenties and were students in England.
In 1935, Anand and I, together with a few other young Indians founded the Indian
Progressive Writers Movement, spreading to almost all the great languages of India,
blessed and supported by such eminent figures as Tagore and Premchand."

The progressive writers believed that the principal function of literature was to reflect
and express the aspirations and fundamental problems of the toiling masses and
ultimately help in the formation of a socialist society. Even those who were not
Marxists adhered to the idea of a basic social transformation and political
independence. A new content is discerned in literature, which not only bears out a
radically revolutionary character but also a basically new rationale for such a change.
"That truth alone should matter to a writer," says Anand in his essay "Why I Write?,"
"that this truth should become imaginative truth without losing sincerity. The novel
should interpret the truth of life, from felt experience, and not from book^."'^

The Progressive Movement then has a reaction against the esoteric and ~nward-
looking art of the nineteen-twenties. In England, it began with the publication of
Michael Robert's anthologies, New Signarures and New Country which grouped
Auden, Spender, Day Lewis, Isherwood and Edward Upward together for the first
time. These writers were responsible for making social realism and tendentious
literature of revolt fashionable in both Europe and America. It was during the same
time that Anand was working on his novel Coolie.He essentially shared the political
and s ~ i aphilosophy
l ofthe left wing intellectuals: "there was ample ~~nfirmation
ln
the thinking h d ofthe younger writers life Aragon, Malraw Auden, Spender, Day
Lewis and *at the~uestionsthey were asking themselves were more or less
Uniouchable
similar to ours in India, and, irrespective of race and colour, we shared similar
concepts and aspired towards hndred objects." " Lefr Review, an important organ of
the new writers, carried extracts from the then unpublished Coolie.

The particular conditions of the Thirties account for many close resemblances
between Anand, Mahatma Gandhi and George Orwell; both had much m common.
esp. a passionate sense of social justice, "a recognition, more than a recognition.
indeed knowledge--of the innumerable frustrations and suppressions. Both men hated
the social prejudices that helped to maintain the oppressive status quo; the class
system in England, the caste system in 1ndia."I2 Moreover, both the writers shared a
profound dislike of colonialism. In tone and temper, Orwell's Road to Wlgan Pier
carried the same burden as Anand's Coolie.

One of the notable consequences of this movement was a growing rejection of the
aestheitc theory of "art for art's sake." Anand has felt, from the very initial stages of
his awareness of the human predicament, that the writer cannot shut himself in an
ivory tower; he cannot stand on a high perch, but has to go into the raging storm
itself, to be with the people to ally himself with their many sorrows and little joys.
The purpose of the novel, according to Anand, is to change mankind, and through
mankind society. He is vehmently opposed to the formalists or aesthetes who hold
that art, though influenced by life, is essentially governed by its inner logic and not
by outside forces. Nor has he any sympathy with the writers who are self-centred
subjectivists indulging merely in petty variations of Proustian aestheticism

The Thirties movement defined in specific terms the position of the artists and the
functions of his art. In Apologyfor Heroism, Anand places the writer on a very high
pedestal, glorifying him as "precisely the man who can encompass the whole of
life."I3 He is superior to the moralist, the scientist and the politician, each of whom
takes a limited view of man, whle the writer "is uniquely fitted to aspire to be a
whole man to attain, as far as possible, a more balanced perspective of life." l 4 A
novelist like any other artist is concerned chiefly with the truth. And he reveals it not
like the philosopher who does it in a cold statement of dogma but only in terms of
life, rendered through the devices of dramatization.

Anand, like Lawrence, Gorky, and Eric Gill, believes that the work of a genuine
creative writer is inspired by a mission. He seems to be in full agreement with
Arnold's dictum that literature at bottom is the criticism of like. He is strongly
committed to his creed, and in his opinion "any miter who said that he was not
interested in a condition humane was either posing or yielding to a fanatical love of
isolationism--a perverse and clever defense of the adolescent desire to be different."I5

The Thirties movement proved to be a watershed in the literary sensibility in Europe.

It shook the writers from age-old slumber and awakened them to the realization of
new possibilities, whlch had so far eluded them. The early fiction of Anand was truly
representative of the movement. His fictional world depicted not the feudal splendors
and mysticism of traditional Indian literature, but the hard and suffering lives of the
millions of his countrymen. Anand thus ushered in the realistic fiction.

In the choice of themes, therefore, Anand is unquestionably an innovator. He is the

first novelist writing in English to choose as his raw material the lower-class life of
the Indian masses. In Untouchable and Coolie, he almost dreads the flight of
imagination, feels shy of soaring high and keeps close to the ground with a
vengeance. He does not hesitate to turn the floodlight on the darkest spots in Indian
life.
 d
ii

2.6 THE WRITING AND PUBLICATION OF Life and Work of I:

Mulk Raj Anand
UNTOUCHABLE 1'

UntouchabIe was written over a long weekend in 1930. Mulk Raj Anand tells us that
it poured out like hot lava from the volcano of his imagination, and that during its
composition he hardly slept for more than six hours in three days. In his article On
the Genesis of Untouchable:A Note, Mulk Raj Anand tells in detail about the writing
of the novel. During a long week-end in the early twenties in Dublin, he started
writing the first draft of the novel, then called Bakha. A little later, he came across a
poignant story about a sweeper-boy Uka, &itten with utmost simplicity by
Mahatama Gandhi in Young India. Anand wrote to the Mahatma and was allowed to
meet him in three months' time. In April 1929, he went to see Gandhiji in the
Sabarmati Ashram in the boiling heat of Gujarat. He showed Gandhiji the novel he
had written.

Gandhiji was opposed to the writing of a novel depicting the love-affair of a boy and
girl. Anand explained to him that it was about Bakha, a sweeper-boy, an untouchable.
Gandhiji suggested that he should write a straightforward pamphlet about Harijans.
Anand defended himself by saying that he wimted to tell the story just as Gandhiji
had aarrated his story about the sweeper Uka. Anand was allowed to stay in the
Ashram provided he promised not tb drink, not to think of his English girlfriend and
clean latrines once a week. The three-month stay in the ashram rejuvenated Anand.
The austerities that he practised there awakened his conscience and converted him to
Untouchable Anand read some portions of the novel to Gandhiji who suggested that he should cut
down more than a hundred pages, specially those passages in which Bakha seemed to
be thinking and dreaming like a Bloomsbury intellectual. Following Gandhiji's
advice, Anand revised the entire novel during his three month stay in the ashram. Out
of two hundred and fifty pages, only one hundred and fifty pages were left. He read
the revised version to Gandhiji who gave his approval to it.

However, the book failed to draw the attention of the publishers for more than two
years. Anand felt quite disheartened by the fact that no publisher found the book
worth publishing. Edward Thompson,-an eminent writer of several books about India,
wrote a letter to Anand giving reasons for the publishers' rejection of the manuscript:
"It is true that Indian books do not sell. There is such a welter of prcpaganda and
sentimentalism over everything Indian-British die-hard, National Congress journalist,
fake poet and mystic, theosophist, Gandhi-adorer, American Women's club, all
combine to make everything Indian depressing to anyone not half-witted. I seem to
find signs that India is beginning to bore even ~ndians."'~ As a matter of fact, the
novel was not accepted because it was unlike the traditional books. The main
objection to the book was the squalor and dirt that it depicts.

Even Bonamy Dobree, a leading literary figure m d friend of Anand, found the book
wanting in some respects. He advised Anand "to make the beginning a little more
different.. . ... ...It does smell rather strong." He wanted Anand to delete the
descriptions of dirt and cruelty in novel, for he felt that "the average reader does not
want to be instructed but amused." "

Following the advice of Dobree and other critics, Anand revised the novel several
times. For example, he tones down the opening pages of the novel. In writing of
these, he had been greatly influenced by Dickens' description of London slums.
Jonathan Cape, The Bodley Head, Chatto and Windus, and several other publishers
turned it down, in spite of strong recommendation from Dobree.

Perhaps the most encouraging response came from E.M.Forster. After reading the
manuscript, Forster wrote to Anand a letter on 5 May 1934: "I found it extremely
interesting.. .... ..you make your sweeper sympathetic yet avoid making him a hero or
a martyr, and, by the appearance of Gandhi and conversation about machinery at the
end, you give the whole book a coherence a d shape which it would otherwise have
lacked."

By September 1934, the novel had been rejected by as many as nineteen publishers.
. Anand felt so disheartened that he contemplated suicide. At that juncture, a young
British poet Oswell Blakeston took the manuscript to Wishart Books. The pubilsher
accepted to publish it on the ~onditionthat the eminent English novelist E.M.Forster
should write a Preface to protect it against being called 'dirty'. Forster not only
quickly supplied the Prehce but also insisted that Anand should accept the fee
received for writing the Preface. He wrote the Preface as a matter of conviction. "It
will be a great pleasure to me," he said, "if I should be of any help in introducing such
an interesting and original piece of work to readers in this country."

The book was published on 1 May 1935. It received a mlxed response to begin with.
but soon it established for itself a popularity that remains unrivalled for a work of .
fiction by an Indian author. In 1944, the Penguin edition of the novel was published.
By now, the novel has been translated into thirty-six languages of the world. Anand
now lives in Khandala, a small hill station about hundred kilometres from Bombay
and is leading a very active life-writing, attending seminars and conferences, meeting
people and doing social work. His busy s~heduleof work shows him to be one of the
most energetic of literary men of the twentieth century.
2.7 LET US SUM UP .- Life
Mulkand
RajWork
Anmdof

In this unit we have discussed the shaping influences on Anand's life- parentage,
association with the writers of Twenties and Gandhiji. We have also told you in
detail the genesis of his master piece Untouchable. With these insights you should br
in a better position to appreciate Anand's contribution to literature and society.

2.8 QUESTIONS

I. What major influences moulded the literary career of Mulk Raj Anand?

2. Trace the literary achievement of Mulk Raj Anand.

2.9 SUGGESTED READING

Mulk Raj Anand. Apology for Heroism. Bombay, 1957. ~

Mulk Raj Anand. "Why I Write?" Kakatiya Journal of English Studies, vol. 11, No. 1
Spring 1977.

Mulk Raj Anand. "On the Genesis of untouchable: A Note," in The Novels ofMulk
Raj Anand, ed. R.K. Dhawan. New Delhi: Prestige Books, 1992.

Beny, Margaret. Mulk Raj Anand: The Man and the Novelist. Amsterdam: Oriental
Press, 1971. -

Saros, Cowasjee. ed. Author to Critic: The Letters ofMulk Raj Anand to &ros
Cowasjee . Calcutta: Writers Workshop, 1973.

Saros, Cowasjee. So many Freedoms: A study of the Major Fiction ofMulk Raj
Anand. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1977.

Dhawan, ~ : ~ . Explorations
ed. in Modern Indo-English Fiction. New Delhi: Bahri.

E.M. Forster. Abinger Harvest. London, 1953.

H.H.AnniahGowda. "Mulk Raj Anand," The Literary Half-Yearly, vol. VI, No. 1
Janauary, 1965.

Chetan K a e . "Mulk Raj Anand: The Novelist as a Socialist Chronicler," Thought,

23 August, 1974.

Sinha, Krishna Nandan. Mulk Raj Anand. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1972.

References
1
H.H.AnniahGowda, "Mulk Raj Anand," The Literary Half-Yearly, vol. VI,No. 1
Janauary, 1965, p. 50.

Chetan Kamani, "Mulk Raj Anand: The Novelist as a Socialist Chronicler,"

Thought, 23 August, 1974, pp. 19-20.
 3
Utouckable Sa!os, Cow asjee, ed. Author to Critic: The Letters of Mlrlk Rq Amnd to Sarc s
Cokuasjee. Calcutta: Writers Workshop, 1973, pp. 15-16.

Ml !lk h . j Anand, Apology for Heroism. Bombay, 195 7,p.78.

'I
C.Ew ' s L s ~ ~Saros.
~ ; , So many Freedoms: A study of the Major Fiction ofMulk Raj
A tzand. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1977. p.24.

'11, .d;p 32.

It id; p. 35

M . f:orster, Abinger Harvest, London, 1953, p. 768.

'".vl~.rlkRaj Anand, 'Why I Write?" Kakallya Journal of English Studies,vol. 11, No.
1 Spring 1977, p. 251.

' .Dhn~vara,1R.K.d. ExpIorations in Modern Indo-English Fiction. New Delhi: Bahri,

1982, y.80

' ' A.W. Anand. p, 87.

""MulkRaj Anand, "On the Genesis of untouchable A Note," in The Novels o f f i l k

Rat Arrond, ed. R.K. Dhawm. New Delhi. Prestige Books, 1992. p. 80.