Signs and signatures
Mulk Raj Anand
The man and the novelist
Darshan Singh Maini

Mulk Raj Anand’s crowded life of 99 years was so eventful as to offer many an interesting story. So each of his friends had something personal to relate, and the expanding Anandiana kept swelling till the end. My own impressions of "Uncle Mulk" are associated with our meetings in his Cuffe Parade house, Mumbai, and with his frequent visits to the Punjabi University, Patiala, where he would frequently drop in for the chat or a meal, wearing his favourite cor duroy trousers, with his ubiquitous bottle of brandy in his hip-pocket. Later in Chandigarh too, we had frequent meetings but after the shattering events of Operation Bluestar, he drifted away from me, for my stringent articles on Indira Gandhi didn’t please him.

It’s, however, the novelist who is the donnee of this exercise. And to make my story compact, I’ve had to leave out nearly all his later novels which, in any case, showed signs of decline and fatigue. That was the time when Marxian thought and Gandhian philosophy jostled with each other to win the hearts of Indian intellectuals. Deeply influenced by the humanist wave in the West — his Cambridge days, in particular — he returned to India to challenge the mighty British Empire. A series of stinging satires and novels of agonised protest followed in quick succession.

Anand, around this time, was being pulled between two clashing ideologies — of Marxism and Gandhism. He was in search of the point of convergence, and came to the view that the goal was common though the methods different.

In his first novel, Untouchable, the harrowing tale of an 18-year old Harijan youth, Bakha, is dramatised skilfully and forcefully. A victim of the caste hatred of high-caste Hindus, he like his tribe, carried a huge grouse going back to the days of the Manu code. His need for self-assertion came when one day he saw his sister being sexually assaulted by the temple priest inside the holy premises. He barged in, and with one hefty blow brought the offender to his knees. As Anand puts it, "the slave in him" had risen to settle the score of centuries. That was a moment of moments — a moment of elation and triumph.

In Coolie, Munoo, another down-trodden victim of native and British cruelty reaches Simla to become a rickshaw coolie, hauling tons of pampered flesh over the mountainous terrain. His innocent love for the Indian contractor’s young daughter, and his sexual experiences in the bedroom of an elderly matron, leave him sullen and sour. Unlike Bakha, he remained passive, obedient and subdued, crushing all feelings of revolt within his heaving breast. He is a fatalist and accepts his fate as his karma.

In The Big Heart, Ananta, an educated Bombay worker returns to his native city of Amritsar to organise the thathiars or coppersmiths who were in danger of being wiped out by a factory set up for the purpose. And in this struggle, he lost his life, though his spirit remained puissant, undaunted.

In Two Leaves and a Bud, the hero, Gangu, too is a fatalist, and has to undergo daily indignities at the hands of his plantation masters. The tea gardens in Assam become a symbol of his slavery. Even the kind British doctor could do little to alleviate his sufferings, the master, Reggie Hunt being an arrogant bully, sadist, and a whip-wielding tyrant.

It was Anand’s belief that "man may die, his ideas will live." In his Apology for Heroism, he commented: "Any writer who said that he was not interested in le conditions humaine was either posing, or yielding to a fanatical love of isolationism". Again, in a lecture, East-West Encounter, he noticed that the Afro-Asian nations had been denigrated and their cultures destroyed, for the western imperialist powers had, for hundreds of years, put them down under the Jack-boot. In yet another address, he admired the spirit of Lenin, Mao Tse Jung and Nehru for their acceptance of the technologies of advancement and industrialisation.

In a separate place, Anand hailed the art form of the novel as a fit medium suited to the needs of the emerging free nations. It was a genre that translated this genius, their culture and their heritage. He considered the novel per se a mode of arrival, of salvation.

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