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Passages...
Passages... Passages...
Mulk
Raj Anand: laureate of the downtrodden
Namita Gokhale assesses a fulsome life and a writer
of integrity, whose passion for justice will outlive his prose
 Mulk Raj Anand
was born on December 12, 1905. In the 99 years of his packed life, he examined
a society in transition, its social struggles and cultural archives. Long
before Midnight’s Children reclaimed the English language from its
colonial past, an earlier generation of Indian writers like Mulk Raj Anand,
Raja Rao and RK Narayan were establishing the voice of Indo-Anglian writing
for an international audience. Novels like Untouchable (1935) and Coolie
(1936) were written with an intense sense of ideological engagement, and
Mulk Raj was described as ‘the laureate of the downtrodden.’
Mulk Raj’s legacy must be examined in the context of the multi-layered
genealogy of recent Indian literature. Sarojini Naidu’s The Golden
Threshold was published in 1905, the year of Mulk Raj’s birth. In
a trajectory familiar to those times, Naidu abandoned poetry for politics.
Some of the novels of Bankim Chandra Chatterji and Romesh Chunder Dutt appeared
in English as well as Bengali, as did Tagore’s The Home and the World
(1919) and Gora (1923).
But in the 1930’s, the trinity of Mulk Raj, Narayan and Raja Roy dominated
the literary space of the day. Gandhian economics and politics charged the
novels with varying degrees of purpose and propagandist intent. Now forgotten
writers like KS Venkatramani published fiction like Murugan the Tiller (1927)
and Kandan the Patriot (1932). Raja Rao’s Kanthapura, still a definitive
text in many curricula, was a saga of the satyaagraha. Shanker Ram’s
The Love of Dust (1938) was also an emotional panegyric to the peasantry.
Only RK Narayan peppered the mood of the day with gentle irony.
To quote VS Naipaul, in another context, “We look back to the golden
age and we are aware that we are looking at historical events.” An
obituary is not an occasion for sentimentality, but an opportunity to remember,
assess and understand. To be truthful, time has not been kind to Mulk Raj’s
work. His bleeding heart prose and the passionate involvement and fervent
archaisms of his writing have not weathered the distance of literary perspective.
To understand the spirit of the age, Nehru’s and Gandhi’s writings
remain the appropriate prose classics, rendering the fictionalised interpretation
slightly irrelevant.
This is not to belittle Mulk Raj’s progressive views, his charismatic
personality, his extraordinary understanding of and engagement with his
times. As the author of Persian Painting (1930) and The Hindu View of Art
(1936), as founder-editor of the highly respected art quarterly, Marg, and
as Tagore professor of art at Punjab University, Mulk Raj fostered a holistic
and integrated appreciation of India’s cultural and aesthetic tradition.
The journey from Khalsa College, Amritsar to Cambridge and London, the friendships
with Forster, Virginia Woolf, Henry Miller and Henry Read, the interventions
in social issues and espousal of the disenfranchised, all document a prolific
life, well lived. Mulk Raj fought untouchabilty, casteism, child labour
and the Spanish Civil war. Unfortunately, good causes do not make for enduring
literature. In an interview with The Times of India during Orwell’s
centenary year, Mulk Raj is quoted to have said “In recall, I feel
our friendship was an example of independent writers from the imperial country
and the subject country getting together.” The imperial moment has
passed, the literary torch moved on to more confident appropriation. A new
generation of readers might well rediscover the body of work that this astonishing
and prolific writer left behind. What really survives is the image of an
unquenched anger, a passion for equity, and an uncompromised integrity in
aesthetics, politics, and the lived life.
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October 09, 2004
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