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Mulk Raj Anand passed away at the ripe age of 98 on September 28, 2004, and left behind him a remarkably large number of novels and collections of short stories. He deserves the credit of entertaining and enlightening generations of readers during his lifetime and his works will continue to do so in the times to come. It may not be an exaggeration to say that he was, he is, and he shall be socially very relevant as an author-novelist with purpose, cause, and concerns. It is also quite relevant to assert that Anand tried to do with his pen what Mahatma Gandhi did through his political actions. Anand will be remembered as a novelist of the lowly, the lost, and the underdog. Not that he was the first novelist to be the voice of the poor and the downtrodden. Bankim Chandra, Rabindranath Tagore, Saratchandra, and Premchand had also done it effectively in their novels. It was Anand who took the romanticism of Bankim, humanising breath of Tagore, Premchand’s sympathy for the suffering people and Saratchandra’s understanding of human hearts to synthesise the texture of his novels. That is why he has been called a writer who wrote of the people, for the people and as a man of the people.
Before Untouchable (1935), Indian English novels were mainly based on history or romance and they were primarily written for enjoyment or escapism. Anand’s temperament and social concern were not suited to such ventures. His missionary zeal for the welfare of the masses had added purpose and brought a new direction to Indian novels in English. Anand was a humanist, a proletarian who did not believe in ‘art for art’s sake’, but wrote to awaken the social conscience. He was audacious enough to admit that he was using literature as a means to some other end, and that this end was the alleviation of the suffering of fellow human beings. He has made his position very clear in his Apology for Heroism: "Any writer who said that he is not interesting in la condition humaine was either posing or yielding to a fanatical love of isolationism." In the same book he asserts; "just as I desire a total and truly humane view of experience, a view of the whole man, in order that is completely new kind of revolutionary human may arise, so I have been inclined to stress the need for truly humanist art commensurate with the needs of our time." Anand’s works were inspired and influenced 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. The best tribute that we could pay to this great novelist would be to read his novels and be inspired by the dedication and commitment that he had.
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