Yet Another Farewell: Remembering Mulk Raj Anand

"Well, this handshake goes all the way back to Shakespeare. Just as you're shaking my hand, I shook Eliot's hand, he shook Yeats's hand, Yeats shook Tennyson's hand, Tennyson shook Keats's hand . . .." All the way back to Shakespeare.

Like Moraes, the older Anand was a great shaker of hands: "He visited D. H. Lawrence shortly before he died. He worked with Leonard and Virginia Woolf as an amanuensis at the Hogarth Press. He lunched many times with T. S. Eliot, knew W. B. Yeats and G. B. Shaw, and wrote a book of reminiscences called Conversations in Bloomsbury." This is an article by Alastair Niven, who also wrote a book on Anand, The Yoke of Pity, and is typical of the openings of many essays and articles on the writer. Others mention the fact that he studied under Bertrand Russell, travelled to Vienna to talk with Freud, went to Spain to fight for the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War, was acquainted with Herbert Read, Henry Miller, William Empson and H. G. Wells.

I had a chance to see Mulk Raj Anand at close quarters at the 1986 Commonwealth Writers Conference at Edinburgh. He was frail but intense, as he went about organizing a protest against apartheid South Africa. I did not go up to shake his hand, but that does not make me feel any less connected. Moraes's charming fancy offers a touching metaphor for the role of literature (and the arts) in our lives. Writers shake hands, literally and figuratively, not only with each other but also with their readers, thus connecting all who are interested to our creative heritage. That is why the death of a loved and respected author like Anand strikes us as a personal loss.

Anand belongs to the remarkably long-lived generation of writers of the 1930s and '40s with whom Indian English prose attained maturity---Nirad Chaudhuri, R. K. Narayan and Raja Rao (still with us)being the others. But it was undoubtedly Mulk Raj Anand's voice that dominated the fiction of that period. Born in Peshawar in 1908, he graduated from Punjab University, then studied at Cambridge and London universities finishing with a Ph.D. in 1929. From 1932 to 1945 he taught at the Workers Educational Association in London, but kept visiting India frequently. During the war years Anand also worked for the BBC as a broadcaster and scriptwriter; his friend George Orwell was a colleague. After the war he returned to India, and started Marg, the celebrated art journal, in 1946. From 1948 to 1966 Anand taught at several Indian universities and was associated with the Sahitya Akademi and other cultural institutions, but it was always as a novelist that he was best known.

Anand's career as a novelist kicked off in 1935 with the publication, after it had been rejected by nineteen publishers, of Untouchable. Gandhi became as potent an influence in him as the Western socialist tradition, and went a long way in shaping his social conscience. In his early novels, as, in fact, in the works of his compatriot Raja Rao, Gandhism is as large a presence as the principal human characters. The story goes that upon his return to India with the manuscript, he turned up at Gandhi's ashram at Gujarat dressed to the nines in a corduroy suit, silk tie and suede shoes. Aghast, the Mahatma (and author of Hind Swaraj), told the young man that he looked like a monkey. Afterwards, Gandhi advised him on the novel: "Your untouchables sound too much like Bloomsbury intellectuals. You know an untouchable boy wouldn't talk in those long sentences." Anand took the advice to heart and rewrote the novel, which was subsequently published with a laudatory preface by E. M. Forster. A moving critique of the caste system, the book was provoked by a family tragedy: a beloved aunt committed suicide after she had been ostracized by her Hindu community for having had a meal with a Muslim. A number of other novels followed in quick succession, all exploring the lower depths of Indian society in the classic social realist mode: Coolie (1939), Two Leaves and a Bud (1937), The Village (1939), Across the Black Waters (1940). One aspect of Anand's social realism is the adaptation of the Indian (Punjabi and Hindi) idiom into 'pidgin-English'---and in doing so awkwardly anticipated Rushdie by four decades. Later in his career he delved into the upper echelons of society in Private Life of an Indian Prince (1953), and produced several volumes of an autobiographical sequence, but never again matched the achievements of his earlier work. Mulk Raj Anand remained a socialist to the end: Despite the existence of a master cottage on his verdant five-acre plot in Khandala near Pune, where he had shifted residence from his modest flat in Cuffe Parade, Mumbai, the writer preferred to live in one of the outlying houses on his property. He also left his property to the Sarvodaya Trust, a charitable non-profit organization devoted to the promotion of Gandhian ideals.

Among major Indian English novelists Anand is perhaps least known today in the West. This is partly because his progressive politics and social realist aesthetics have gone out of fashion, and partly because his idiom lacks the finesse and flair of some of the other Indian writers. But in India readers will always warm to his simple, moving, humane narratives. His characters, like Bakha the untouchable or Munnoo the coolie, have become immortal. They are both types and sharply realized individuals. Whatever the aesthetic limitations of Anand's prose it nonetheless, with its close attention to the surface of life in pre-Independence India, affords the reader a clear view of his characters and their world. One could say that his works will remain memorable because like all authentic realistic writing, they show the triumph of the signified over the signifier.

Kaiser Huq teaches English at Dhaka University.