Source: http://extra.shu.ac.uk/wpw/thirties/thirties%20bluemel.html#_edn7
For original visit the like above
Mulk Raj Anand's Passage through Bloomsbury
For original visit the like above
Mulk Raj Anand's Passage through Bloomsbury
Kristin
Bluemel
In the
midst of Gandhi's satyagraha (nonviolent noncooperation)
campaigns of the 1930s, Britain tried to impose a series of 'reforms'
on its rebellious Indian colony in a last-ditch attempt to preserve the borders
of its decaying empire. These reforms, which futilely rearranged
boundaries of land and distributions of power, were symbolized by two universally-despised
British publications: the 1933 White Paper and its Constitutional variation,
the 1935 Government of India Act. The negative reception
in India of the two publications of British political discourse
stands in marked contrast to the positive reception in England of Mulk Raj
Anand's works of Indian political fiction. Untouchable,
Anand's first novel, was published in London with a Preface by E. M.
Forster in 1935. It is about one day in the life of 18-year-old
Bakha, a sweeper who cleans the public latrines in the morning and by evening
has begun to question the necessity of his caste exclusion after hearing a
speech by Gandhi. This novel, along with two others Anand published
in the 1930s, Coolie and Two Leaves and a Bud,
earned him reviews in The Spectator, Life and Letters
To-Day, London Mercury, and New Statesman, and
leftist publications like the Left Review and Congress
Socialist, establishing him as the best Indian novelist practicing in
English, superior even to R. K. Narayan. They also earned him a
reputation as the most revolutionary of India's writers working in
English. The ambiguous legacy of this dual reputation—as a fine
novelist and outspoken revolutionary—has determined Anand's position in
twentieth-century English literary history. [1]
On the
one hand, Anand’s 1930s novels have been regarded as productions of late
modernist Bloomsbury. This categorization is encouraged by
Anand's connections with several of Bloomsbury’s foremost writers: in
addition to Forster he was supported by Leonard and Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot,
and Edith Sitwell (Cowasjee, So Many 27). On the
other hand, his Marxist commitment, tutoring by Gandhi, and experience in
Republican Spain paint a portrait of the paradigmatic Thirties
writer. He seems the perfect representative of artists who created
the literature of the Red (or Pink) Decade, including his friends and
correspondents Herbert Read, Aldous Huxley, Cyril Connolly, George Orwell,
Stephen Spender, Henry Miller, Montagu Slater, V. S. Pritchett, Victor
Gollancz, Louis MacNeice, C. Day Lewis, Dylan Thomas, Naomi Mitchison, Stevie
Smith and Eric Gill. [2] Despite
this impressive list of associates, Anand's name is rarely mentioned in
critical analyses or histories of London’s literary culture in the
1930s. To account for the critical silence about Anand's years
in Bloomsbury, this paper analyzes the relationship between the
revolutions created in and by Anand's fictional worlds of the 1930s and his
reinvention and reinterpretation of those revolutions in his nonfictional
narratives of the 1940s, most importantly his propagandistic Letters on
India (1942) and his autobiography Apology for Heroism (1946). [3] It
argues that Anand's nonfiction writing of the 1940s provides more daring and
concrete visions of his revolutionary socialist ideals than his more famous
novels of the 1930s.
Having
achieved a literary form adequate to the content of his politics, Anand
promptly lost the support of those English leftists who had been the strongest
supporters of his earlier work. Sticking to his politics, Anand
risked social alienation from his literary peers rather than suffer modification
of his views on the necessity of India's immediate freedom from colonial
status or his belief that Stalin's betrayal of Britain was no reason
for Indians to give up on Communism (Cowasjee, So Many 30). Ultimately,
he paid a high literary price for his commitment, losing not only a place in
Thirties memoirs, but also a place in English literary history. [4] His
contributions to English literature of the 1930s most likely became the
causalities of local, literary politics of anticolonial protest and colonial
backlash.
My
analysis of the gap between the reception in leftist circles of Anand's radical
fiction and his radical nonfiction suggests that Anand’s diminishing reputation
among leftists had less to do with any failures of the literary imagination,
and more to do with many English leftists' allegiance to England's
imperial identity and specifically its right to ruleIndia.
I
conclude that the construction of the 1930s as a 'dishonest' decade is in part
a consequence of the exclusion of “true” radicals like Anand—uncompromising
Indian nationalist and unrepentant Marxist--from the textual record valued by
dominant English intellectuals and in part a consequence of the arbitrary
designation of the 1930s, rather than 1940s, as the only radical decade of the
early twentieth-century. [5] I
treat Anand’s more complete achievement of the radical political-literary goals
of the 1930s in his writings of the 1940s as a case study that supports my more
ambitious project of introducing a new literary category, 'intermodernism',
into critical discourse. Adoption of the category of intermodernism
solves some of the problems resulting from the unfortunate, sticky label
'dishonest decade' in part because it diminishes conceptual walls between
somewhat arbitrarily defined periods: the Thirties, the
Forties. Although I will use the traditional period categories in my
discussions of Anand’s work, my larger argument is indebted to thinking across boundaries
between genres and periods, of recognizing Anand’s writings as part of one
intermodern movement or discourse sustained, in various forms and with
differing social-political effects, throughout the 1930s and
1940s. Regarding Anand as an intermodernist rather than or in
addition to a late Bloomsbury modernist, Thirties radical, or Indo-Anglian
(post)colonialist, encourages critics to read and value his less famous texts,
providing new rationale for including his name and writings in discussions of
literary London. [6]
The term
intermodernism, which I treat as an analytical tool rather than a label for a
literary-historical period, describes the literary efforts of Anand and other
writers like him. In contrast to modernist writers, for example,
intermodern writers tend to have their origins in or maintain contacts with
working- or lower-middle-class cultures. As young people, they do
not fit into the Oxbridge networks or values that shaped the dominant English
literary culture of their time because they have the 'wrong' sex, class, or
colonial status. As adults they remain on the margins of celebrated
literary groups. Intermodern writers tend to hold down regular jobs
(soldier, secretary, journalist, factory worker, teacher) to supplement their
income from writing. Perhaps as a result, they often write about
work. When intermodernists experiment with style or form, their
narratives are still within a recognizably realist tradition. They
do not often demonstrate that archetypal modernist impulse toward mystic
epiphany (Lawrence) or mythic allusion (Joyce or Eliot). This
realist bias may be a symptom of the journalist’s skills many intermodernists
developed while writing their more memorable novels, stories, or radio
dramas. The intermodernists' social marginalization, financial
dependence on jobs and free-lance journalism, and debts to realism often
resulted in writing that attends to politics, especially politics that may
improve working conditions. Salvation or redemption in intermodern
texts tends to be pursued through narrative strategies or symbolic influences
that are intellectually and culturally available to ordinary, non-elite,
working men and women. Intermodernism contributes to what F. R.
Leavis famously called England’s minority culture, but it also cheerfully
partakes of and contributes to the mass culture Leavis distrusted.
Without
the category of intermodernism it is almost impossible to convey the sense of
non-modernist cultural activity that endured throughout the 1930s and into the
1940s to which Anand contributed. The critical discussions that have
grown up around study of other twentieth-century literary movements, including
those signaled by the phrases Bloomsbury, the Auden Generation, the Thirties,
the Forties, interwar and war literature, are certainly still relevant for
studies like this one, but the addition of intermodernism to these preexisting
discussions promises to bring exciting new materials and approaches to
scholarship on the period. As much as critics will bemoan introduction
of yet another label into critical discourse, I still advocate against the odds
for widespread adoption of the category of intermodernism because we need more
subtle tools than those provided by the vocabularies of modernism and
postmodernism to assess the vast transformations of British interwar and
wartime culture.
We need
look no further than Anand's friend and BBC colleague, George Orwell, to
understand the advantages intermodernism offers scholars of twentieth-century
English literature. A survey of criticism on Orwell shows that few
scholars choose to describe his literary work in terms of the dominant cultural
movements of his time. He is rarely 'Orwell, of the Auden
Generation' or 'Orwell, the World War II writer' (and never, thank goodness, 'Orwell,
the modernist' or 'Orwell, the postmodernist'). With a literary
career extending roughly from 1933 to 1949, and with books and essays that
discuss things like the Spanish Civil War to freedom of speech or anti-Semitism
in wartime, Orwell is of course of the Thirties and equally of the
Forties. But Orwell scholars resist describing him in these terms,
either because they do not want to encourage a view of the literary-historical
Orwell as a divided man, 'of' two separate decades, or because they want to
encourage a view of Orwell as a uniquely autonomous writer, 'saint' George
Orwell, the 'wintry conscience of a generation.' Both these
approaches to Orwell provide no solution to the problem of naming Orwell's
place in English literary history. And if critics can not name
Orwell's place, imagine the trouble they have with Anand. The
category of intermodernism provides one way out of that
trouble. With it, we have new language for locating and navigating
the still-unnamed place in literary history occupied by Orwell, Anand, and
their undervalued contemporaries of the 1930s and 1940s. Without that
category, without that name, scholars will do what they have always done:
construct syllabi that accommodate the categories recognized by staid,
affordable textbooks while writing densely theoretical papers that play
postmodern language games with the very notion of naming. Neither of
these approaches adequately highlights the continuities between various forms
of 1930s and 1940s writing or the relations between these intermodern forms and
the forms of modernist and postmodernist movements that dominate critical
discussion about the period.
Intermodernism
helps us see how Anand's nonfictional 1940s texts draw their rhetorical,
ideological power from the contradictory experiences and identifications that
arose from his move to England in the 1920s. On the one
hand, he was a highly-educated, high-caste Indian, on the other he was
committed to Marxism and international socialism. He advocated Indian
independence, but chose to do so in London, the center of imperial
power. Productive as these conflicting allegiances were for his
autobiographical heroes and first-person narrators, his fictional low-caste
heroes of the 1930s do not benefit in the same way from their experiences with
social and ideological contradiction. None of these heroes is able to
envision a less oppressive, postimperial future for himself
or India. Bakha returns to his family and work with little more
than the first glimmerings of hope for a better future for
untouchables. Munoo, the hero of Coolie, is a fourteen
year old orphan boy from the hills who is propelled from one deplorable job to
another in a variety of Indian cities. The novel ends with his death
from consumption while he is employed as a personal servant and rickshaw driver
of a degenerate Anglo-Indian woman. Even Two Leaves and a
Bud, which more concretely represents Anand’s socialist belief in the
possibilities of collective action, ends with the defeat of a group of workers
seeking better working conditions on a tea plantation and the murder of the
novel's protagonist, Gangu, by the Assistant Planter, a vicious, drunken,
power-hungry sexual predator who is absolved by the English of any wrongdoing.
While it
is true that Anand was influenced by many of the same intellectual and
political texts that other modernists and intermodernists read, his 1930s
fictions struck most readers of the time as radically different for the
following reasons: they are exclusively about India and Indians, are
the first examples of Indo-Anglian fiction to adopt outcastes or social pariahs
as their heroes, they use English in a new way to communicate Indian idiom, and
they integrate the political speeches of the period’s most prominent Indian
political figures, Gandhi and Nehru. More generally, Anand's fiction
is regarded as a cornerstone of the first generation of Indo-Anglian writers
who came to represent independent and postcolonial India.
In his
controversial Introduction to The Vintage Book of Indian Writing,
1947-1997 Salman Rushdie writes, "it was the generation of
independence, 'midnight's parents', one might call them, who were the true
architects of this new [Indo-Anglian] tradition" (xvii). Rushdie’s
comparison of writers in Anand's generation to "true architects"--the
real builders or creators of modern India's enduring English prose
tradition, encourages us to see Anand's novels as doing something importantly
new and innovative. More than thirty years before Rushdie made this
judgment, Srinivasa Iyengar made a similar argument in his 1962 Indian
Writing in English. [7] Like
Rushdie, Iyengar defends the legitimacy of Indo-Anglian writers despite their
hybrid linguistic, cultural genealogies and places a similar emphasis on the
newness of their enterprise. With less confidence but equal insight
he makes a plea for critical open-mindedness since "an experimental
literature would thus need an experimental critical approach for its proper
evaluation" (Iyengar 20). With the invention of 'new
modernisms' at the end of the twentieth-century, the theoretical and critical
climate has changed enough to allow recognition of Anand's different kind of 'modernist'
experiment, as well as the necessity of a new critical approach to his
revolutionary literary work.
By the
phrase "Anand's revolutionary literary work", I mean his
texts'challenges to the norms of mainstream English and Indian cultures and
institutions through their promotion of an anti-elitist vision of social
relations and political institutions. The threat that Anand's
fictions posed to contemporary readers can be measured in a variety of
ways. First, as Forster notes in his Preface to Untouchable,
the contents of Anand’s book will make "some readers, especially those who
consider themselves all-white, . . . go purple with rage before they have
finished a dozen pages" (v). Forster comes to this
conclusion after recalling how one reference to the sweepers and commodes of
Chandrapur in Passage to India inspired an English Colonel to
pen in the margins of his book, "Burn when done" and "Has a
dirty mind". More than ten years after his Indian novel
scandalized readers, Forster still had to mount an attack on the moral equation
of goodness and cleanliness in order to defend Anand's novel about an
untouchable cleaner of latrines.
A second
way to measure the revolutionary potential of Anand's fiction of the 1930s is
through the reaction of the governments in England and India. According
to Iyengar,Untouchable, Coolie, and Two Leaves and a
Bud were banned by the Government of India (261). Thirdly,
Anand's early novels would have been perceived as revolutionary by any readers
who knew of his political activism. As a college student
in India, Anand had participated in the 1921 Civil Disobedience campaigns
against the British, which earned him a brief jail term. He was
jailed again after joining a student strike against the British Government's
tacit support of the Sikh grandees. In 1926, shortly after his
arrival in England, Anand was manhandled outside the Euston Square Station
for refusing to blackleg against the General Strikers. Witnessing
the British Government's treatment of English strikers taught him a powerful
lesson: that "Britain was organized and run in the interests of a small
minority which could suppress the majority as violently at home as it did in
the Empire" (Apology 36). This experience convinced
him that international socialism was the only viable political means for
addressing world problems (Cowasjee, So Many 12).
Anand
became a dedicated Marxist in 1932 upon reading Marx's "Letters
on India" (Cowasjee 12). The importance of
Anand's in-depth engagement with Marx's writings is evident from his memoir, Apology
for Heroism, in which he writes: "A whole new world was
opened to me. All the threads of my past reading, which had got tied
up in knots, seemed suddenly to straighten out, and I began to see not only the
history of India but the whole history of human society in some sort of
inter-connection" (67-68). In 1936 he joined the International
Brigade in the University Trenches in Spain, though he, along with other
writers, was recalled by the Communist Party and put in a safer journalistic
post which he held for three months. Two years later he returned
to India, campaigning across the country for the Republican
cause. He also worked for the Indian National Congress and the Kisan
Sabha (Farmers' Union), and helped organize the Second All India
Progressive Writers' Conference in Calcutta (Cowasjee, So
Many 20-21).
For
anyone fascinated by the literary culture of 1930s London, a fourth meaningful
way of measuring the revolutionary potential of Anand's words is through his
loss in the early 1940s of his 1930s friendships with many of the prominent
modernists and what I would call intermodernists. Saros Cowasjee,
one of Anand's most insightful critics, speculates that this loss partly
explains why Anand is rarely mentioned in the memoirs of his contemporaries (So
Many 27). Cowasjee points out that "Anand's attitude
toward his contemporaries was chiefly determined by their stand on the question
of Indian freedom" and that he tested the limits of their revolutionary
commitments most pointedly in his 1942 Letters on India (So
Many 29). This 'test' followed his unpopular 1940
novel, Across the Black Waters, which is about the misadventures of
a group of Indian mercenaries in British Army during World War I. As
Graham Parry points out in a rare essay on this novel, Anand's timing could not
have been worse. Published at a low point of English morale during
World War II, Across the Black Waters is an undisguised attack
on a British Government at war (Parry 32-33).
The
same Bloomsbury writers who in the 1940s rejected Anand along with
his literature, had, several years before, received Untouchable as
an important novel by one of their own. They welcomed its attacks on
caste and class discrimination and took pleasure in its offense to people they
perceived as antagonists, Anglo-Indian loyalists and committed British
imperialists. They would not have predicted that, many years later,
it would prove equally offensive to Arun P. Mukherjee, a postcolonial critic
who shares postmodern versions of Anand's professed goals and
commitments. Mukherjee’s essay, entitled "The Exclusions of
Postcolonial Theory and Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable: A Case
study," places analysis of Anand’s work at its center as a means of
criticizing the homogenizing tendencies of postcolonial
theory. Mukherjee claims that postcolonial theory’s most influential
spokespersons—Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, Helen Tiffin, Benita Parry,
Fredric Jameson, and even Rushdie—flatten out the 'Indianness' of India's
literature because their theoretical writing "thematizes India’s literary
texts only in terms of search for identity and resistance to the colonizer,
entirely overlooking collaboration" (32).
It is
this last objection about collaboration that leads Mukherjee into his critical
case study of Untouchable. He sees Anand as a writer
with a "radical cognitive intentionality" whose fiction is not,
finally, radical or subversive and whose literature requires from leftist
critics a "hermeneutic of suspicion. . . like any other text"
(35). Among other things, Mukherjee recounts the political history
of activist untouchables whose leaders articulated demands that often ran
counter to the Indian National Congress Party positions that Anand
echoes. Mukherjee finds it "absolutely astounding" that
"Anand does not refer at all either to the oppositional acts or the
oppositional discourses produced by untouchables at this time period all
across India" (46). [8] Although
the Government of India found Untouchable threatening enough
to ban it, Mukherjee concludes that Anand's Untouchable "successfully
contains the realities of the volatile social order at this period of Indian
history" (42). He asserts that "It reassures its bourgeois
readers, both in India and in Britain where it was originally published, that
the simmering unrest among the untouchables would not lead to a violent
destabilization of the status quo"(42).
It is
this mention of Untouchable's reception, and particularly its
reception in Britain, that inspires the next part of my
argument. Taking as my starting point the idea that Anand's 1930s
fiction is divided between a radical intentionality and collaborationist
effects, I examine the political and aesthetic implications of Anand's
(ambiguously) non-hegemonic position in two of his nonfiction texts of the
1940s, Apology for Heroism and Letters on India,
in order to complicate Mukherjee's reading and advance Anand’s reputation as an
intermodern radical writer. [9]
Anand's
many autobiographical writings document his divided position in India—a
division that is evident on the micro-level of family politics as well as the
macro-level of caste allegiance. Born into a Hindu family of Kshatriya, the
second highest caste of the old four-fold scheme, Anand grew up in the
cantonments of northern India. His father had given up the traditional
coppersmithing trade of his ancestors and had devoted himself to secular
advancement in the British-Indian army (Apology 29-31). Anand
characterizes his mother as a simple, silly woman of peasant origins whose
vague pantheistic religious practices were a source of mockery and amusement
for him and his male relatives. The divide between father and mother
symbolizes Anand's larger social, political divisions as an Indian and a
writer. This divide is more dramatically illustrated by Anand's
description of his immigration to England. He writes in Apology for
Heroism, "The immediate cause of my impetuous decision [to leave for
England] was that my father hit my mother in an argument about my having gone
to jail in the Gandhi movement and having fallen in love with a Muslim girl
from Lahore" (45). This is a painful but perfect example of the way family
politics introduced Anand to the contradictory claims of his social position
even before he left India. He was nearly torn apart by divided loyalties to
masculine power and feminine nurturing, collaborationist advantage and
revolutionary practice, Hindu social privilege and Hindu religious oppression.
If we
consider Anand's situation in England in the mid-1930s, the time Untouchable was
published, it is obvious that his flight westward merely allowed him to
exchange one set of contradictory social and political experiences for
another. By earning a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of London,
he demonstrated his intensive training in the ideological foundations of the
idealized imperial center.Yet devoted study of these foundations facilitated
his move toward an anti-imperialist Marxist commitment. Trying to
launch a career as novelist, he found himself similarly divided between
commitments to more and less powerful forces. By the early 1930s, he
was convinced that he needed to use his writing to advance leftist political
goals. Yet he began his writing career by working on the Criterion for
the conservative T. S. Eliot.
In a
volume of essays entitled Conversations in Bloomsbury that
Anand published decades after he had returned to India, he makes the most of
his English connections in order to demonstrate his own importance to the
Empire's intellectual center. Yet in Apology for Heroism,
which he wrote while working as a propagandizing voice of English imperial
defense in the BBC's Eastern Services Division, he emphasizes his distance from
his English colleagues and peers. Written two years before Indian independence,
this document accuses almost all the intellectuals of the 1930s of lacking a
centrality of vision. Anand, in contrast, was trying to find a
comprehensive theory that would allow him to understand 'human values' in terms
of the "problem of politics and economics, particularly the wretchedness
of the human beings in India" (82-3). [10] His
reflections on this period of his intellectual and spiritual life lead him to
confess to feeling "a considerable gap" in his relations with English
writers (83). While he admits to being grateful for their loyal
friendships, he also admits to "a certain kind of self-consciousness in
[his] . . . discussions [with them] about India" due, in part, to his own
"inferiority complex" but also certainly due to what he calls
"the acquiescence (conscious or unconscious. . . ) by most British writers
I knew at that time, with the status quo and with the arguments used even by
the most obtuse of publicists against the advancement of the under-privileged
both in Britain and the Empire" (83).
Curiously,
Anand here accuses British writers of doing precisely the same thing Mukherjee
criticizes Anand of doing: maintaining a cowardly allegiance to the status
quo. In each case, the good, liberal intentions of the accused only
intensify the critic's accusations. Although Anand writes, "I
don’t want to exaggerate the significance of such differences of opinion
[between himself and English writers]", in the next breath he declares,
I was
also firmly convinced that there could be no dignity in the personal relations
of British and Indian intellectuals unless British writers realized that the
freedom of speech and opinion which they took for granted was denied to their
friends in [India], and unless they saw to it that intellectuals everywhere
enjoyed equal rights of citizenship. (84)
The
phrase,"no dignity in the personal relations of British and Indian
intellectuals", throws into question the reality of the friendships Anand
confirms elsewhere in Apology for Heroism. This is an
important declaration of difference, his confession in the 1940s that the
friendships of the 1930s were, all along, only
pseudo-friendships. By the time he published his Apology,
Anand regarded favorably only Bertrand Russell, Leonard Woolf, H. N.
Brailsford, Lowes Dickinson, E. M. Forster, and Edward Thompson (85). [11]
Given the
high moral tone of the autobiography and its strikingly unapologetic
critique of English intellectuals as "selfish","petty", and
"egotistical" betrayers of the ideals of European culture (87), one
must wonder about the real contents of the apology. Suspicions
that Anand is offering nothing but the forms of apology are confirmed
by the end of the sixth and central chapter of the book. Here Anand
writes,
If it is
not a simplification, I may say, generally, that the youth of India during the
last quarter of a century had been going through a kind of heroic
age. All our gestures, all our thoughts, all our talk—everything
that we did—had been inspired by the belief that we must create a new India,
build a new world. (96)
Asserting
nothing less heroic than building a new world, Anand here offers only the
appearance of apology for thinking too boldly or crudely about the artist's
political role.
Given the
strength of Anand’s belief in his generation’s heroism, his choice of Apology
for Heroism as a title for his autobiography seems
odd. Perhaps it is a concession to the book’s initial readership:
members of a leftist English literary community who, despite their socialist
leanings, could not separate themselves from the fate of a nation shaken by
years of economic crisis, class division, Blitz bombings, and the ongoing and
very real loss of Empire. In this English context, in which Anand is
both insider and outsider, privileged spokesperson for the intellectual elite
and disempowered representative of Britain's colonial subjects, trusted friend
and contentious revolutionary, the contradictory nature of his 'apology' is
understandable.
Another
cause for the contradictions of Anand's Apology is its status
as autobiography, a genre which affirms individualism no matter how much
autobiographers wish to advance revolutionary collectivist
causes. Anand's readers are entirely justified in asking how far,
really, he moves from the "egotistical", "selfish,"
nonheroic performances he associates with the majority of English 'radical'
writers of the period given his celebration of self in Apology. For
precisely this reason, Letters on India is an important text
to read in conjunction with Anand’s more famous texts. In contrast
to Anand's other, possibly 'collaborationist' fictions of the 1930s or
egotistical nonfiction of the 1940s, Letters on India heroically
takes up an unpopular, minority stance on behalf of poor and oppressed Indians,
announcing his radical departure from the politics of mainstream English
culture, and the liberal, leftist politics of his Bloomsbury friends.
Letters
on India is
a remarkable book to read in the context of British wartime activity since it
vigorously accuses the British government of many of the crimes the British
were levying at enemy Fascists. The epistolary form Anand adopts to
mount this criticism is calculated to earn the sympathies of activist workers
in England. It announces itself as the edited version of an exchange
of eighteen letters from one Tom Brown, factory hand, and Anand, local expert
on the “India problem,” that followed from Anand’s first public letter on India
to The Fortnightly in June, 1942.
Published
by the Labour Book Service, the Letters are preceded by
Leonard Woolf's introduction to the book. Woolf, famous in
Bloomsbury for his socialist and literary credentials, must have been asked to
write the introduction because of his service in Ceylon from
1908-1911. Although Woolf begins with the affectionate salutation,
"Dear Anand," he ignores the conventions of the introduction genre
and springs into an argument against the very book he has agreed to
support. Woolf defends his iconoclastic departure from the
conventions of introductions by noting,
It will
not be the usual kind of introduction, which seems to me nearly always
impertinent, in both senses of the word, for in it a distinguished or
undistinguished person irrelevantly pats the author on the
back. Even if I wanted to—which I do not—I would not dare to pat you
or any member of the Indian Congress Party on the back. (vii)
He goes
on to characterize his "friend" as an untrustworthy advocate of the
"extreme Congress case" who has produced a book that is
"dangerously biased" and full of "a lot of nonsense" (vii). Woolf's
objections boil down to one thing; he believes Anand is not fair to
the British. He complains, "[The British] record in India is
not as black as you make out, black though it may be" (viii).
Anand's
reply to Woolf's introduction only hints at what must have been his profound
astonishment upon reading the hostile beginning to his book. After
modestly noting that he was "rather disturbed" by the introductory
letter, he objects,
That a
socialist publicist of your experience, and a person whom I respect, should, in
spite of my obvious socialist analysis, accuse me of being a prejudiced
extremist, made me say to myself: "Either I have failed to convey my real
point of view, or Woolf is showing his own particular prejudices in warning
people against my alleged bias". On reflection I am convinced
that in your zeal to warn Tom Brown against my one-sidedness you have almost
gone to the Amery extreme. (x) [12]
Fortunately
for scholars of the end of Empire, Anand gets the last word in this battle
between leftists. His defense against Woolf's attack is sure,
specific, and unapologetic, as is his extended and persuasive critique of
British imperialism in the rest of the book.
I hope it
is clear from Anand's response to Woolf that Letters on India provides
the kind of uncompromising Indian hero that Mukherjee finds missing from
Anand’s most famous novel, Untouchable. I also hope that
my analysis of the relation between Anand’s (ambiguously) non-hegemonic social
positions and his literary productions modifies Mukherjee’s accusations against
Anand for collaboration with bourgeois imperialist
agendas. Mukherjee warns that if we take at face value the versions
of nationalist historiography advanced by Anand's Untouchable,
"we run the risk of being caught off guard by history"
(43). Fair enough. But we can be caught off guard by
literature too. This paper is intended to demonstrate that Mukherjee’s
case study of Anand is impoverished by an inattention to
literature—specifically literature by Anand. Two of his nonfictional
texts of the 1940s, Apology for Heroism and Letters on
India, illustrate better than his fictional texts of the 1930s the
importance of literary form for analyses of authors’ social positioning and
their writings’ ideological effects.
Anand's
1940s nonfiction presents more thoroughly, consistently radical heroes than his
1930s fiction because his autobiographical narratives are freed from the
constraints of modernism. Instead of depending like Untouchable on
the tradition of the stream-of-consciousness novel, with its debt to the
alienated, romantic hero of bourgeois realism, Anand’s nonfiction heroes are,
ironically, empowered by the nonfictional constraints of their
narratives. The implications of this conclusion are that critics
must ask questions not only about Anand’s ambiguous positioning in various
social contexts and the 'real' history of India, as Mukherjee would insist, but
also about the traditional materials and methods of literary study.
Examination
of Anand's changing reception and reputation in England—typical literary
concerns—leads to the following, more general question about mid-century
English literature: How should we categorize and interpret stories
of that whole awkward expanse of 1940s, and before it, 1930s English literature
that remains opaque and inadequate when analyzed in terms of modernism or
postmodernism, Marxist revolution or capitalist reaction, Eliot, Auden, or
Waugh? My answer to this question, intermodernism, deserves more
extensive treatment than is possible here, but in what follows I sketch out how
my study of Anand’s Bloomsbury experience supports my more general argument
about the need for intermodernism in any discussion about 'The Thirties Now!'
My term,
intermodernism, is intended to help readers see relationships between writers
and writings that are typically divided, to make it easier to understand the
political-aesthetic productions of those who consulted with and sometimes
depended on more established modernist figures like Forster or the Woolfs, but
who defined their artistic missions according to distinctive, nonmodernist
social and political contexts. [13] While
the literature of the 1930s and 1940s has always been read in terms of the
political events signified by the chilling words Depression, Appeasement, World
War, and Recovery, the art of the 1930s is usually seen as too leftist or too
naïve to be understood in relation to England's finest hour. Yet a
significant percentage of the literature produced during the 1930s and 1940s
contributes to a distinct body of writing that makes the best sense when read
against the troubling backdrop of Hitler’s rise to power in
Germany. This is the literature of intermodernism. It is
the literature hidden by the slash between modernism/postmodernism, that which
occupies the famous 'great divide' that Andreas Huyssen identifies with the age
of Stalin and Hitler (197).
Intermodernism,
like modernism and postmodernism, is best thought of as a kind of writing,
discourse, or orientation rather than a period that competes with others for
particular years or texts or personalities. I offer intermodernism
as a literary-critical compass, an analytical tool that can help scholars
design new maps for the uncharted spaces between and within modernisms. [14] By
encouraging critics to think in terms of threes—'inter' always forging a
connection or bridge between at least two other territories—intermodernism permits
a more complex, sensitive understanding of many writers' relations to literary
London and mid-twentieth-century English history.
My claim
is that much of the literature of the 1930s and 1940s for intermodernism is
guided by three kinds of thinking. It is on the one hand a strategy
of pragmatic, ends-based logic: criticism of modernism, no matter how revised,
expanded, and renovated, has always had trouble accounting for the literature
of writers associated with the 1930s and 1940s, even 'highbrow' writers like
Auden, Day Lewis, or Henry Green. [15] While
the so-called Auden Generation has gained institutional credit for
its distinct contribution to 1930s literature, it is typical to find in general
accounts of twentieth-century literature the admission that "Modernism and
Thirties writing existed in uneasy coalition right through the decade"
(Bradbury 211). These same studies often acknowledge the writing of
men like George Orwell and Samuel Beckett who worked outside of the networks of
Oxbridge-educated writers of the 1930s, but then tend to treat that writing as
eccentric to the mainstream of English literature. (The writing of
women and working class or immigrant men of the 1930s has, with few exceptions,
been contained within specialized, ghettoized literary traditions.) And
no one seems to worry at all about the ways separation of the 1940s from
'Modernism and Thirties writing' has exacerbated these problems of exclusion.
Instead
of discounting non-dominant 1930s and 1940s literature or striving to interpret
it in ways that accommodate modernist or wartime criteria, this study urges
scholars and teachers to value intermodernism in addition to, and at times,
above, separate categories of modernism, postmodernism, The Thirties, The
Forties, interwar, war, and postwar literature. It seeks to legitimize
nearly invisible, interconnected 1930s and 1940s texts like Untouchable, Coolie,
and Apology for Heroism—the diverse forms of writing that are not
associated with a 'particular cadre' of men and institutionalized by a
particular cadre of critics (Bradbury 208).
The
second kind of thinking that motivates my construction of a newly conceived
category of intermodernism is respect for the theoretical advances of other
revisionary critical movements and desire to extend the lessons of those
advances to new materials. For decades, feminist, postcolonial, and
other dissident critics have questioned the traditional lineages of literary
history and shapes of university curricula. The impetus to examine
the 'low' and the 'high' (or in Anand’s case, what is between the two), to
think in terms of 'text' instead of 'work,' of culture as well as poem, play,
and fiction, to question the logic of period by taking 'other' genres and
sources into consideration--all of these scholarly movements have made research
for and publication of research like this possible, if not
probable. It is still an awkward kind of project to promote,
celebrating as it does a figure whose literary, cultural work is virtually
invisible if approached through the dominant categories that organize
discussion about British literature. But it is precisely the
creation of awkwardness, the invitation of a prickly, irritated response, that
can generate attention in otherwise preoccupied readers and maybe even inspire
them to change their reading habits and critical assumptions.
In order
to inspire change, awkwardness or irritation must lead to something
pleasurable, and my concern with the pleasures of reading is the third kind of
thinking that motivates this paper and the larger project on intermodernism of
which it is a part. Focused on texts by a highly-educated,
anti-imperialist, Indian man published during the two decades he was living and
working in London, this study bets that readers will come to appreciate the
special pleasures provided by his writings once they open themselves up to the
history, the ambition, or simply the colorful difference of his life and
work. It also makes a bet that the category of intermodernism can
help teachers of English literature make sense of Anand's career and thus
prepare them to see and value the achievements of other “1930s writers” whose
ideals were more fully achieved in the 1940s.
Works
Cited
Anand, Mulk Raj. Across the Black Waters. 1940. New
Delhi: Vision Books, 1978.
---. Apology for Heroism: A Brief
Autobiography of Ideas. 1946. 3rd ed. New
Delhi: Arnold-Heinemann, 1975.
---. Conversations in Bloomsbury. New
Delhi: Arnold-Heinemann, 1981.
---. Coolie. 1936. London:
Wishart, 1975.
---. Letters on India. London:
Labour Book Service, 1942.
---. Two Leaves and a Bud. London:
Lawrence and Wishart, 1937.
---. Untouchable. London: Lawrence
and Wishart, 1935.
Bamezai, Gita. Mulk Raj Anand: The
Journalist. New Delhi: Kanishka Publishers, 2000.
Bradbury, Malcolm. The Modern British
Novel. London: Penguin, 1994.
Cowasjee, Saros, ed. From Author to
Critic: The Letters of Mulk Raj Anand. Calcutta: Writers
Workshop, 1973.
---. So Many Freedoms: A
Study of the Major Fiction of Mulk Raj Anand. Delhi: Oxford UP,
1977.
Cunningham, Valentine. British Writers of
the Thirties. New York: Oxford UP, 1988.
Davies, Andrew. "Jack Lindsay and the Radical
Culture of the 1940s." Jack Lindsay: The Thirties and the Forties.
London: University of London, Insititute of Commonwealth Studies, 1984. 74-80.
---. Where did the Forties Go? London:
Pluto P, 1984.
Deen, Stella, ed. Challenging
Modernism: New Readings in Literature and Culture, 1914-1945. London:
Ashgate, 2002.
DuPlessis, Rachel Blau and Members of Workshop
9. "For the Etruscans: Sexual Difference and Artistic
Production—The Debate over a Female Aesthetic." 1979. The
Future of Difference. Ed. Hester Eisenstein and Alice
Jardine. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1985. 128-56.
Eysteinsson, Astradur. The Concept of
Modernism. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1990.
Forster, E. M. Preface. Untouchable. 1935. By
Mulk Raj Anand. New York: Penguin, 1940.
Hapgood, Lynne and Nancy Paxton, eds. Outside
Modernism: In Pursuit of the Novel 1900-1930. New York:
Palgrave, 2000.
Huyssen, Andreas. After the Great
Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism. Bloomington:
Indian UP, 1986.
Hynes, Samuel. The Auden Generation:
Literature and Politics in England in the 1930s. Princeton: Princeton UP,
1972.
Iyengar, Srinivasa. The Indian
Contribution to English Literature. Bombay: Karnatak
Publishing, 1945.
---. Indian Writing in English. New
York: Asia Publishing House, 1962.
---. Indo-Anglian Literature. Bombay:
P.E.N. All-India Centre, 1943.
Kenner, Hugh. The Pound Era. Berkeley:
U California P, 1971.
Levenson, Michael H. The Genealogy of
Modernism: A Study of English Literary Doctrine 1908-1922. New
York: Cambridge UP, 1984.
Miller, Tyrus. Late
Modernism: Politics, Fiction, and the Arts between the Wars. Berkeley:
U California P, 1999.
Mukherjee, Arun P. "The Exclusions
of Postcolonial Theory and Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable: A Case
Study". Ariel: A Review of International English Literature. 22
(1991): 27-48.
Munton, Alan. English Fiction of the
Second World War. London: Faber and Faber, 1989.
Parry, Graham. "Anand, Orwell and the
War". The Novels of Mulk Raj Anand. Ed. R. K.
Dhawan. New Delhi: Prestige Books, 1992. 30-8.
Rushdie, Salman and Elizabeth
West. Introduction. The Vintage Book of Indian
Writing, 1947-1997. Ed. Salman Rushdie and Elizabeth
West. London and New York: Vintage, 1997.
Shuttleworth,
Antony. "Introduction: In What 'Thirties?'" And
in Our Time: Vision, Revision, and British Writing of the 1930s. Ed.
Antony Shuttleworth. Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 2003.
Skelton, Robin. Poetry of the Thirties.
Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964.
Visram, Rozina. Asians in
Britain: 400 Years of History. London: Pluto
P, 2002.
Williams, Keith and Steven Matthews,
eds. Rewriting the Thirties: Modernism and After. New
York: Longman, 1997.
Woolf,
Leonard. Introduction. Letters on India. By
Mulk Raj Anand. London: Labour Book Service, 1942. vii-ix.
End Notes
[1] Throughout this
essay I refer to historical periods, usually the years between 1930 and 1949,
with dates rather than words: the 1930s or '30s, the 1940s or
'40s. When referring to the more limited literary-historical periods
constructed by classic anthologies or accounts of these periods such as Robin
Skelton’s Poetry of the Thirties, Samuel Hynes’s The Auden
Generation or Valentine Cunningham’s British Writers of the
Thirties, I use words rather than dates: the Thirties or the Forties.
[2] In addition to Anand's Conversations
in Bloomsbury, see Saros Cowasjee's So Many Freedoms and
his edition of Anand's letters, Author to Critic, for references to
Anand's diverse London associates in the 1930s.
[3] The subtitle of Anand's Apology has
assumed different forms through the years. When Anand finished the
book in 1945, it had the subtitle "An Essay in Search of
Faith." It went through numerous editions, including the second 1957
edition with its new, one-paragraph “Preface” and the third 1975 edition with
its new nineteen-page "Preface". The 1975 Mayfair paperback
edition I used in my research also had a new subtitle, "A Brief
Autobiography of Ideas".
[4] In So
Many Freedoms, Cowasjee includes an impressive list of thirty-four writers
who Anand was friendly with in the early 1930s, "not to cast reflected
glory on Anand but rather to emphasize that of this impressive list only a few
remained close friends" (27). He assumes that Anand's politics
lost him the friendships in the early 1940s of all but seven: Orwell and Read,
who as "Anarchists" did not object to Anand's "passion for
Indian freedom and his attack on Britain"; Forster, Dobree, and Henry
Miller, who "valued personal friendship above state and politics";
and Edgell Rickword and Jack Lindsay, who were "arch-enemies of
Imperialism under all circumstances" (30).
[5] See Andrew
Davies's essay on Jack Lindsay in Jack Lindsay: The Thirties
and Forties and his study, Where Did the Forties Go?, for
a rare account of the radical culture of the 1940s.
[6] My proposal of
a new category of intermodernism should be seen as part of the widespread
project to rethink mid-century English literary history. Signs of this project
include a number of sessions on 'new' or alternate modernisms proposed for the annual
conferences of the Modernist Studies Association, a stream of conferences on
topics like "British Women in the Thirties" (held at CUNY’s Graduate
School in September 2000), "Retrieving the 1940s" (held at the
University of Leeds in April 2002), and "The Noise of History" (held
at the Dylan Thomas Centre in Swansea in November 2003), and special issues of
journals on topics like "Gender and Modernism between the Wars,
1918-1939" (NWSA Journal’s 2003 issue) or, obviously, this one on
"The Thirties Now!"
One of
the more encouraging signs of scholars' commitment to exploring the new
subjects and histories supported by the types of panels and special journal
issues mentioned above is the existence of a group called The Space
Between. Dedicated to the study of literature and culture between
1914-1945, the society’s annual conferences have provided stimulating contexts
for my efforts and those of other younger scholars to reconsider modernism and
its relation to the 1930s and 1940s. Two volumes of collected essays
have emerged to date from The Space Between conferences, Stella Deen's Challenging
Modernism (2002) and Antony Shuttleworth's And in Our Time (2003). These
books extend the discussions of The Space Between conferences into print and so
provide an important textual backdrop for this study.
[7] Iyengar's study
had its beginnings in the war years when he published a pamphlet, Indo-Anglian
Literature, for the PEN. All-India Centre's fifteen-book series on
"The Indian Literatures." This pamphlet became, in 1945,
the more complete book, The Indian Contribution to English Literature. All
of these studies discuss Anand's early novels and treat him as one of the
originators of Indian literature in English.
[8] For alternate
interpretations of the integrity of Anand’s radicalism, see Gita
Bamezai's Mulk Raj Anand: The Journalist and Rozina
Visram's Asians in Britain. Bamezai places Anand's
literary activities in the context of Indian revolutionary
politics. She believes that "anti-touchability movements and
caste mobilisation during [the early 1930s] greatly influenced Anand’s decision
[to write about untouchables]". But she notes that
"Anand's own experience of casteism was restricted to Punjab which had not
witnessed any radical movement against untouchability"
(56). Visram's chapter on radical Indians in Britain mentions
Anand’s activism on behalf of the India League, which was devoted to winning
from its primarily English members support for the Indian freedom movement
(324).
[9] I first encountered
the Gramscian term "(ambiguously) non-hegemonic"in the experimental
work on the female aesthetic conducted by Rachel Blau DuPlessis and the Members
of Workshop 9 (147). Interpreted through radical feminist thought of
the seventies, the term strikes me as an especially productive way of
describing Anand’s social position in literary London.
[10] The personal history
recounted in Apology is retrospectively shaped to reveal the
origins of Anand’s acceptance of two such comprehensive theories, Marxism and
humanism. There is a literal re-birth in Apology at
the point Anand describes his Marxist conversion; the narrative unconsciously
begins again with a return to the materials of its earliest pages: "I was,
then, an Indian, a British subject by birth, born of a father who had broken
away from the hereditary profession of artisanship and joined the mercenary
British-Indian army, and of a peasant mother. . . ." (103).
The story of Anand's embrace of humanism is less
dramatic, but can be inferred from the shifts in subtitles of Apology and
the various prefaces to the memoir. English language criticism on
Anand that appeared during the 1960s and 1970s, the Cold War years, is largely
taken up with arguments about whether his humanism is sufficiently purged of
his Marxism.
[11] In defense of Anand's
English writer-friends who do not earn favorable mention in Apology,
it’s worth noting that Anand’s standards for the committed artist were almost
impossible to meet, in part because he kept changing them. One of
his more sensible declarations is that "[Precisely] because modern
commercial society had forced the writer into isolation, it was necessary for
him to link himself with the disinherited, the weak and the dispossessed, as a
human being and as an artist with special talents, to help transform
society" (Apology 122). While it is not clear what
form of heroism the writer should adopt to fulfill such a goal, at least
readers can imagine the heroism taking place in a mortal realm. Anand later
compares the writer to God in language that recalls the boy scout manual or
maybe the immature Stephen Dedalus of Joyce’s Portrait: "For
the writer alone, if he is honest and brave, is in a position to . .
. perceive the most delicate processes of the human sensibility, on
the aesthetic as well as the cognitive and conative [sic]
planes. And, if he is possessed of true creative ability, he can
transform his knowledge into a vision such as can claim the loyalty of men in
his own locality, and across national frontiers, and lead them to a universal
awareness of life, thereby possessing them with the will to renew it and to
change it. The writer is like a God who realises his own many
freedoms and confers them on others" (130-31).
[12] Secretary of State L.
S. Amery was despised by Indian National Congress Party members for his
conservative stance toward Indian independence and his receptivity to Jinnah’s
Muslim League divisionist appeals.
[13] Intermodernism may be
most useful for scholars trying to bring understudied writers of the 1930s and
1940s back into critical discussion, but it also facilitates discussion of more
familiar figures like Elizabeth Bowen, Ivy Compton-Burnett, Henry Green, W. H.
Auden, Evelyn Waugh, and Anthony Powell. I build my case for
intermodernism around analyses of the lives and works of Anand and his friends
George Orwell, Stevie Smith, and Inez Holden in George Orwell and the
Radical Eccentrics, a work-in-progress (forthcoming from Palgrave
Macmillan) that will have chapters based on this and other working papers.
[14] The need for
the tool of intermodernism is implied by the number of scholarly books that are
devoted to defining and redefining relations between modernisms. In
one of the best of these books, The Concept of Modernism, Astradur
Eysteinsson rejects all the most familiar descriptions of postmodernism's
relation to modernism, finally leaving readers with the idea that "while
[. . . ] there may be no postmodernism" there is a modernism whose major
achievement may have been "its subversion of the authorityof
tradition" (emphasis in original; 136-37). Modernism understood
in this way invites us to add the names of radical cultural figures like Anand
to those of other, earlier anti-traditionalists who populate books like The
Pound Era or The Genealogy of Modernism. But
such an expansive modernism asks us to settle for a category with periodizing
meanings and effects without attending to the problems with history and value
that typically accompany the very concept of period. The tenuous
connections between literary period and historical narratives in Eisteinsson's
chapter point to the differences between our approaches to the
modernism/postmodernism problem.
[15] The titles of
four recent studies on the 1930s focus attention on the uncomfortable relation
between literature of that decade and modernism: Stella Deen's Challenging
Modernism: New Readings in Literature and Culture, 1914-1945, Lynne Hapgood
and Nancy L. Paxton's Outside Modernism: In Pursuit of the Novel
1900-30, Tyrus Miller'sLate Modernism: Politics, Fiction, and the Arts
between the Wars, and Keith Williams and Steven Matthews's Rewriting
the Thirties: Modernism and After. Antony Shuttleworth's And
in Our Time: Vision, Revision, and British Writing of the 1930s assumes,
with many other books on 1930s literature, that the period has been
"overshadowed by the achievements of classic modernism"
(11). He suggests that the essays in his collection indicate that
the period is "both more and less modernist than critics have supposed,
more and less postmodernist" (13). Alan Munton makes a similar
argument about the relation of World War II literature to modernist
categories. He criticizes David Lodge's conventional
"tripartite system" of dividing the twentieth century into a
modernist period, antimodernist period, and postwar period of the Angry Young
Men, concluding that "In its literary aspect the war has disappeared into
an Orwellian memory hole" (3).
