Source: http://www.isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=60&issue=105
International Socialism:A Quarterly Journal of
Socialist Theory
Mulk Raj Anand: Novelist and Fighter
Talat Ahmed
The Indian novelist Mulk Raj Anand passed away at the grand old
age of 98 last September. He was arguably the greatest exponent of Indian
writing in English, whose literary output was infused with a political
commitment that conveyed the lives of India’s poor in a realistic and
sympathetic manner. He had been involved in India’s freedom movement, been
impressed by Marx’s letters on India and his general political framework and
had been a co-founder of India’s greatest literary movement in the 1930s. I had
the pleasure of meeting with him at his home in Khandala, outside Bombay, in
March last year. Despite illness and fraility he was able to recall some of his
earlier memories of life in London and India vividly.
Born into a family of metal workers with an army background in
Peshawar, he witnessed the bloody reality of colonial rule with the
Jaillinwalla massacre at Amritsar in 1919. Like most Indians of his generation
he threw himself into Gandhi’s non-cooperation movement. This led him into
student agitation against the British for which he received 11 stripes on his
back and was briefly jailed. The experience had a deep impact on the young
Anand and he concluded that notions of ‘Empire’ and ‘Freedom’ were complete
opposites:
I had grown up in the
ferment of a great moral and political movement in which I had learnt that
alien authority constricted our lives in every way. I can’t say there was no
bitterness in my hatred of imperialism, because I remember how often waves of
fury swept over me to see hundreds of human beings go to jail daily after being
beaten up by the police for offering civil disobedience.1
It was partly to escape further arrest, but also to avoid the
petty bourgeois ambitions of his soldier father, that Anand came to study at
University College London in the autumn of 1925. Unlike most Indian students at
the time he had to work in Indian restaurants and later for a publishing firm
to earn his keep as his family were not in a position to fully finance his
studies or maintenance. But he also became part of the literary crowd known as
the ‘Bloomsbury group’. Here he met writers such as T S Eliot, Leonard and
Virginia Woolf, E M Forster and John Strachey among many others. This literary
elite both impressed him and left him feeling quite perplexed and
uncomfortable. London at that time was the centre of the English-speaking
intellectual world and Anand had hoped to meet with like-minded individuals who
shared his anti-colonial liberal views. To his surprise he discovered that,
according to Eliot, Gandhi was an ‘anarchist’ and that Indians should
concentrate on cultural aspects of their society and leave the politics of
governance to the British! Many of these writers had not visited India and so
their impressions were formed by Rudyard Kipling’s Kim, which to Anand was
typical of colonial fantasies of India. It was partly in response to these perceptions
that he wanted to write.2 As an Indian student in London, Anand found himself
popular with the literary set and, fortunately for him, not all writers were as
parochial as Eliot. He soon found himself drawn to the Woolfs and, more
importantly, E M Forster. Anand held A Passage to India to be the best
fictional writing on his homeland, as this went beyond the orientalist
conceptions of the ‘natives’ and attempted to depict the complex, often
contradictory and mostly confrontational impact of colonial rule in India. He
had wanted to write about the ordinary, the mundane, everyday life experiences
of Indians who were not kings and gods.
James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man impressed
Anand greatly as it was a new literature infused with Irish nationalism. In
1927 Anand went to Ireland and enjoyed the writings of Yeats because his works
represented the lives of ordinary people in villages and towns.
This was to be his model as he set about writing his first novel,
Untouchable, published in 1935. It is a story based on the life of the most
downtrodden, despised and oppressed section of Indian society, the outcastes –
those at the bottom of the caste hierarchy. This story is based on a single day
in the life of Bakha, a latrine cleaner and sweeper boy. We follow him round on
his daily chores cleaning up the shit of the rich and powerful, who despise him
because of strict social rules governing ideas of purity and pollution. When he
walks down the streets he has to signal an alarm with his voice as he
approaches so that the ‘pure’ are forewarned to avoid even allowing his shadow
to be cast upon them. On one occasion he does ‘pollute’ a caste Hindu and is
chased, abused and attacked all day long for this defilement.
Anand was born into the kshatriya warrior caste, which is placed
one below the top caste of the Brahmins priests. He had always befriended and
played with the children of sweepers and as a child he had been shocked and
disgusted by the suicide of a relative who had been disowned by his family for
daring to share her food with a Muslim, for this too was regarded as pollution.
Anand had always been disgusted with and opposed religious sectarianism,
communalism and caste society. His soldier father had been involved with a
Hindu reform movement, Arya Samaj. But Anand kept his distance, for despite its
opposition to child marriage and the prohibition of widow remarriage, the
movement was also quite evangelical in its attempts to ‘re-convert’ Muslims to
the ‘true faith’. To Anand it harboured deep anti-Muslim sentiments with which
he would have no truck.
With the publication of Untouchable, Anand had firmly associated
himself with that brand of writers who saw ‘political, social and human causes
as genuine impulses for the novel and poetry’.3
For Anand literature should be an interpretation of the truth of
people’s lives. It should be written from felt experience and not books. It was
for this reason that he returned to India briefly in 1929. Being influenced by
Gandhi, he came to his ashram in Ahmedabad, where he showed Gandhi drafts of
his novel. Gandhi was extremely critical because he claimed there was too much
of the ‘Bloomsbury’ feel to it, on which he was probably right. While in
Ahmedabad Anand lived like a disciple and did his share of cleaning the toilets
– an act seen as defilement for a caste Hindu. In this period Anand revised his
book considerably and when Forster read it his retort to those who complained
about the ‘dirt’ in the novel, was that “the book seems to me indescribably
clean…it has gone straight to the heart of its subject and purified it”.4
Though this is his best known and most widely read novel, it was
no easy job getting it published in the 1930s. Some 19 publishers had rejected
this story for ‘its dirt’. In despair Anand was on the brink of giving up when
the twentieth publisher accepted the novel on the basis that E M Forster had
agreed to write the preface. Anand praised Forster for his support as it was
not only unusual for an Indian writer to have his central character be a
latrine cleaner; many European writers would not touch a subject like this
either.
Anand displays compassion for the plight of untouchables but never
sentimentality. In many ways the novel represented his thinking beyond the
limits of Gandhi’s idea of untouchables as harijans – children of god. For
Anand this is far too patronising and it is for this reason that his
fictionalised account depicts a debate between a Gandhi-type figure espousing
the oneness of humanity and simple living on the land and a poet who poses a
modern solution to the problems of untouchability flushing toilets!
Anand’s second novel also illustrated his compassion and concerns
for the poor of India. In Coolie he portrays the life of young Munoo, kshatriya
by caste but a peasant boy who travels from his mountainous village through
north India and eventually finds himself in Bombay. He is an orphan and so is
forced to take whatever work he can in order to survive. He works as a servant,
in a mine, a factory and as a coolie – black men who empty their bowels in the
fields. In each of these situations Munoo is subjected to harassment, beatings
and financial exploitation at the hands of employers, moneylenders, and his so
called betters. But the story is also about the development of a young boy who
begins to learn about the world around him and attempt to make some sense of
it. This novel was written in 1936 and has a fictionalised account of a Bombay
riot, which clearly represented Anand’s thoughts on those agents who fuelled
communalism in their desperate attempts to keep the country divided, but also
to keep the poor and workers in their place. So the riot as witnessed by Munoo
is deliberately engineered to break a potential strike through the use of
communalised tensions between Hindus and Muslims.5 In some ways the failure of
progressive and left forces to counter rising communal tensions left Anand
feeling that perhaps partition could not be avoided after the growth of the
Muslim League and the inability of Nehru to counter the right wing elements
within Congress.6
While in London Anand was conscious not only of colonial racist
stereotypes of Indians that were prevalent among some British intellectuals but
also the contempt in which they held British workers. A year after he arrived in
London the 1926 General Strike took place, and was to have a profound effect
upon him. His natural sympathies were with the strikers and their supporters
for he found himself comparing the position of the English worker with that of
Indians under colonial rule and found ‘British democracy’ seriously lacking. He
believed there to be ‘something rotten in the state of Denmark’.7 His outrage
at the way the state treated the strikers was only outstripped by his
astonishment at the attitudes of the majority of his fellow students who were
happy to scab and volunteer to help run trains, trams and tubes. Anand saw this
as treachery and he quickly associated himself with a small group of students
who ‘refused to be bullied by the others’. For his pains he was attacked in
Gower Street by fellow students.8 He had no regrets, stating that ‘in life
there are some things worth getting beaten up for’.9
London was home to many students from India throughout the 1930s
and 1940s and Anand soon found himself gravitating towards the group of writers
who would meet in people’s living rooms to recite poems and short stories, and
above all to discuss the struggle in India and the international crisis with
the forward march of fascism in Europe. Anand was invited to represent India on
the platform at the World Congress of Writers against Fascism in Madrid in
1935. Anand was acutely aware of the threat fascism represented for writers in
Europe and the mortal danger it held for humanity.
After seeing the way writers and intellectuals in Europe were
organising, on his return to London, along with the writer Sajjad Zaheer, an
Indian Communist, he set up the All-India Progressive Writers’ Association
(AIPWA) in 1935. He penned the first draft of their manifesto which with minor
adjustments was adopted at the first conference of the association in Lucknow
in April 1936. This was a pan-Indian organisation that represented all the
major linguistic regions of India and was staunchly secular in outlook and
politically committed to the project of an independent united India with social
justice and equality. At its height it probably had over 30,000 members writing
literature in all the Indian vernaculars. That this literary association was
also a social and political movement closely aligned to the Communist Party of
India and influenced by Nehruvian nationalism is in no small way to be credited
to Anand. Though he never joined the Communist Party, claiming the party would
never have been able to tolerate him, he was very much a ‘fellow traveller’,
aligning himself with the best elements of the left tradition in India.
Anand’s anti-fascist commitment led him to travel to Spain in 1937
to fight with the Republicans in the civil war. He felt it was his duty to show
physical support because he was in Europe. He returned to India briefly in 1938
to address the second AIPWA in Calcutta, where he spoke about his experiences
in Spain and insisted that writers use their craft as a means of exposing
injustice and exploitation.
While in Spain he drafted another novel, Across the Blackwaters.
This is the middle novel of a trilogy published in 1939. It is based on the
experiences of Indian sepoys who are transported to Europe to fight in the
First World War. The central character is Lalu, a young Hindu boy who has
already broken with strict practices of Hindus by eating at Muslim shops while
at home. In Europe we see how the soldiers are treated by their English masters
within the army, but Anand also depicts the strict hierarchies among the
Indians themselves in terms of caste, class and rank. Lalu not only flouts
Indian conventions but in having an on-off flirtation with a French girl he
challenges colonial morality under the very noses of the English officers.
The novel is full of compassion and humanity as well as humour for
the thousands of mostly peasants from the Punjab who died in the trenches of
France and Flanders.10 The roots of this story are in Anand’s childhood. As a
boy he had seen hundreds of men go off to Europe from his town and surrounding
villages but only a handful returned. This novel achieved such critical acclaim
that in 1998 the British Council adapted it as a play to commemorate the
eightieth anniversary of the end of the First World War.
Anand was pivotal to internationalising the experience of Indian
writers to the outside world and he helped to bring an international dimension
to the progressive writers’ movement in India. He is brilliant at satirising
the bigotries and orthodoxies of his times, but his novels also celebrate
the spirit of human rebellion which embodies all his central
characters. Today Salman Rushdie is credited with popularising Indian writing
in English. But 50 years earlier Anand had pioneered the writing of Indian
literature which was accessible to the English-speaking world. And unlike
Rushdie his works were inspired and informed by the lives of real people in
unglamorous situations, warts and all. In addition his writings demonstrate a
keen desire for political change and social transformation that remained with
him throughout his life. The best tribute that readers of this journal could
pay Mulk Raj Anand would be to read his novels and be inspired by the
dedication and commitment he had.
NOTES
1: A Anand, Apology For Heroism: A Brief Autobiography of Ideas
(Kutub-Popular, 1946), pp53-54.
2: See A Anand, Conversations in Bloomsbury (OUP, 1995).
3: S Cowasjee, Author to Critic: The Letters of Mulk Raj Anand
(Writers Workshop Publications, 1973), p1.
4: See Preface to Untouchable (Penguin, 1939), pv.
5: See A Anand, Coolie (Penguin, 1993).
6: Interview with Anand, 8 March 2004.
7: Apology, as above, pp32-35.
8: As above.
9: Interview with Anand, as above.
10: See A Anand, Across the Blackwaters (Orient Paperbacks, 2004),
and also The Village and The Sword and the Sickle.
