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Mulk Raj Anand (1905-2004) | |
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Indian novelist, short-story writer, and art critic writing in English. Mulk Raj Anand was among the first writers to render Punjabi and Hindustani idioms into English. Called the Zola or Balzac of India, Anand drew a realistic and sympathetic portrait of the poor of his country. With Raja Rao and R.K. Narayan he has been regarded as one the "founding fathers" of the Indian English novel. "And he had soon become possessed with an overwhelming desire to live their life. He had been told they were sahibs, superior people. He had felt that to put on their clothes made one sahib too. So he tried to copy them as well as he could in the exigencies of his peculiarly Indian circumstances." (from Untouchable, 1935) Mulk Raj Anand was born in Peshawar, as the son of Lal Chand, a coppersmith and soldier, and Ishwar Kaur. Anand rebelled early on against his father's subservience to the British authorities. His first texts were born as a reaction to the trauma of the suicide of an aunt, who had been excommunicated for dining with a Muslim woman. An unhappy love for a Muslim girl, who was married, inspired some of his poetry. Anand attended Khalsa College, Amritsar, and entered the University of Punjab in 1921, graduating with honors in 1924. Thereafter Anand did his additional studies at Cambridge and at London University, receiving his Ph.D. in 1929. He studied-and later lectured-at League of Nations School of Intellectual Cooperation in Geneva. Between 1932 and 1945 Anand lectured, on and off, at Workers Educational Association in London. In the 1930s and 1940s, Anand divided his time between literary London and Gandhi's India. He joined the struggle for independence, but also fought with the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War. During World War II, he worked as a broadcaster and scriptwriter in the film division of the BBC in London. Among his friends was George Orwell. After the war Anand returned permanently to India, making Bombay his hometown and center of activity. In 1946 he founded the fine-arts magazine Marg. He also became a director of Kutub Publishers. From 1948 to 1966 Anand taught at Indian universities. In the 1960s he was Tagore Professor of Literature and Fine Art at the University of Punjab and visiting professor at the Institute of Advanced Studies in Simla (1967-68). Between the years 1965 and 1970 Anand was fine art chairman at Lalit Kala Akademi (National Academy of Arts). In 1970 he was appointed president of Lokayata Trust, for creating a community and cultural center in the village of Hauz Khas, New Delhi. Anand started to write at an early age. Although Punjabi and Hindustani were Anand's mother tongues, he wrote in English, because English language publisher did not reject his books due to their themes. His career as a writer Anand began in England by publishing short notes on books in T.S. Eliot's magazine Criterion. His acquaintances from this time included such authors as E.M. Forster, Herbert Read, Henry Miller, and George Orwell, who tired to get Anad a full-time post at the BBC. The most important influence upon Anand was Gandhi, who shaped his social conscience. In the early 1930s Anand focused on books on art history. It was not until the appearance of the novels Untouchable (1935) and Coolie (1936), the story of a fifteen year-old child-labourer who dies of tuberculosis, that Anand gained a wide recognition. Untouchable narrates a day in the life of Bakha, an unclean outcaste, who suffers a number of humiliations in the course of his day. Bakha is eighteen, proud, "strong and able-bodied", a child of modern India, who has started to think himself as superior to his fellow-outcastes. The "touching" occurs in the morning, and subsequently shadows the rest of the day. Due to his low birth, Bakha's fate is to work as a latrine sweeper. The powerful critique of the Indian caste system suggested that British colonial domination of India has actually increased the suffering of outcastes, such as Bakha. After 19 rejection slips Anand's novel was published in England with a preface by E.M. Forster: "Untouchable could only have been written by an Indian. and by an Indian who observed from the outside. No European, however sympathetic, could have created the character of Bakha, because he would not have known enough about his troubles. And no Untouchable could have written the book, because he would have been involved in indignation and self-pity." In Two Leaves and a Bud (1937) Anand continued his exploration of the Indian society. The story told about a poor Punjabi peasant. He is brutally exploited in a tea plantation and killed by a British official, who tries to rape his daughter. The socially conscious work shared much with the proletarian novels published in Britain and the United States during the 1930s. Anand's famous trilogy, The Village (1939), Across the Black Waters (1940), and The Sword and the Sickle (1942), was a strong protest against social injustices. The story follows the life of Lai Sing from adolescent rebellion through his experiences in World War I, to his return home and revolutionary activities. In Anand's early novels his social and political analysis of oppression grows clearly from his involvement with the Left in England. Among Anand's later and most impressive works is The Private Life of an Indian Prince (1953). This time Anand focused more on human psyche and personal struggles than on class conflicts. The story had its origins in the betrayal of a hill-woman with whom the author was romantically involved while married to his first wife, the actress Kathleen van Gelder. Anand had met Gelder in London; they married in 1939. After divorce in 1948, Anand married Shirin Vajibdar, a distinguished dancer. Anand's daughter from his first marriage became a writer, too. Since the 1950s, Anand intermittently worked on a projected seven-volume autobiography, entitled Seven Ages of Man. From the project appeared Seven Summers (1951), Morning Face (1968), Confessions of a Lover (1976), and The Bubble (1984). Anand also published books on subjects as diverse as Marx and Engels in India, Tagore, Nehru, Aesop's fables, the Kama Sutra, erotic sculpture, and Indian ivories. Mulk Raj Anand died in Pune on September 28, 2004. Along with the novelista and short story writer Munshi Premchand (1880-1936), Anand was involved in forming dalit literature, used to refer to the "untouchable", casteless sects of India. |
