Mulk Raj Anand - Contribution in Indian English Literature

Mulk Raj Anand: Indian English Literature

Q. Contribution of Mulk Raj Anand in Indian English Literature

Answer: As a novelist, short story writer and art critic in English, Mulk Raj Anand is a great Indian writer, known as Zola or Balzac of India, who paints a realistic and sympathetic picture of the poor in his country. Along with Raja Rao and RK Narayan, he is considered the ‘founding father’ of Indian English novels.

Mulk Raj Anand was born in Peshawar, as the son of Lal Chand, a coppersmith and soldier. Anand initially rebelled against his father's allegiance to the British authorities. His first writings were born in response to the suicide drama of an aunt who was expelled for eating with a Muslim woman. His unrequited love for a married Muslim girl inspired some of his poems. Anand studied at Khalsa College, Amritsar and entered the Punjab University in 1921, graduating with honors in 1924. Afterwards, Anand did his extracurricular studies at Cambridge and the University of London, earning a PhD in 1929. He studied and later lectured at the League of Leagues. From 1932 to 1945, Anand lectured at the Workers' Educational Association in London.

In the 1930s and 1940s, Anand separated his time in literary London and Gandhi's India. He joined the freedom struggle, but also fought with the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War. During World War II, he worked as a broadcaster and scriptwriter for the BBC's film division in London. Among his friends was George Orwell.

After the war, Anand returned to India permanently, making Bombay his hometown and center of activity. In 1946 he founded the art magazine, Marg. He also became the director of Kutub Publishers. From 1948 to 1966, Anand taught at the Indian University. In the 1960s, he was Professor of Literature and Fine Arts at Punjab University and the Visiting Professor at the Institute of Advanced Studies in Simila (1967-68). From 1965 to 1970, Anand was the Chairman of Fine Arts at the Lalit Kala Academy (National Academy of Arts). In 1970, he was appointed president of the Lokayata Trust for building a community and cultural center in the village of Hauz Khas in New Delhi.

Anand started writing at a young age. Although Punjabi and Hindustani were the mother tongues of Anand, he wrote in English because English language publishers did not reject him because of the themes of his books. His career as a writer began in England with the publication of short notes on the book in T.S. Elliot's magazine, Criterion. His acquaintances from this time onward included writers such as EM Forster, Herbert Read, Henry Miller and George Orwell, who tried to give Anand a full-time post on the BBC. The most important influence upon Anand was Gandhi, who shaped his social conscience.

Anand concentrated on art history books in the early 1930s. Until the advent of the novel Untouchable (1935) and Coolie (1936), the story of a 15-year-old child laborer dying of tuberculosis, Anand gained widespread recognition.

Bakha, an unclean outcast, who suffered several insults during his day, describes a day in the life of the untouchable. Bakha is an 18-year-old, proud ‘strong and capable’, child of modern India, who has begun to think of himself as the best of his fellow outcasts. That 'touch' occurs in the morning and later casts a shadow over the rest of the day. Due to his low birth rate, Bakha was destined to work as a latrine sweeper. Strong criticism of the Indian caste system has suggested that the British colonial domination in India has in fact exacerbated the plight of the expatriates like Bakha. After the rejection of 19 times, Anand's novel was published in England with an introduction of E.M. Forster:

“Untouchables can only be written by an Indian and by an Indian who observed from the outside. No European, though sympathetic, could create the character of Bakha, because he did not know enough about his suffering. And no untouchable could write a book, because he was involved in anger and self-pity”.

Two Leaves and a Bud (1937), Anand continued his research on Indian society. The story was told of a poor Punjabi farmer. She was brutally exploited in a tree plantation and a British officer tried to rape her daughter. The socially conscious work shares a lot with proletarian novels published in Britain and the United States in the 1930s.

The famous trilogy of Anand, [The Village (1939), Across the Black Waters (1940), and The Sword and the Sickle (1942)], was a strong protest against social injustice. The story follows Lal Singh's life through his experiences in the First World War, from the teenage rebellion to his return home and his revolutionary activities. The social and political analysis of his actions in the early novels of Anand clearly increased from his involvement with the left in England. Anand's next and most impressive work is The Private Life of an Indian Prince (1953). During this time Ananda focused more on the humanistic mentality and personal struggle than on class conflict. The story originates from the betrayal of a hill woman with whom the author was romantically involved when he married his first wife, actress Kathleen Van Gelder. Anand met Gelder in London; they were married in 1939.

After the divorce in 1948, Anand married Shirin Bajibdar, a prominent dancer. Since the 1950s, Anand has been working non-stop on a seven-volume autobiography, Seven Ages of Man. From the project appeared Seven Summers (1951), Morning Face (1968), Confessions of a Lover (1976) and The Bubble (1984). Ananda also published books on a variety of subjects in India, such as Marx and Angels, Tagore, Nehru, Aesop’s Fable, and some notable Indian ivories. Mulk Raj Anand died on September 28, 2004 in Pune.

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