Mulk
Raj Anand’s Novel Technique
DR
K. V. S. MURTI
The
dancing foot, the sound of the tinkling bells,
The
songs that are sung, and the varying steps,
The
form assumed by our Dancing Gurupara,
Find
out these within yourself, then shall your fetters fall away...1
As Jack Lindsay writes: “In stabilizing and extending the
Indian novel, Anand is also adding to the tradition
of the post-Joycean European novel”.
Just as Huxley’s books trace his ‘self-exploration’ and
‘self-education’, Anand’s picturize
his ‘experiments in truth’ and ‘soul-search’. Anand
says: “As a primitivist, working in the 20th century,
I found that I too have been looking, from the small hole in my head (like
Hemingway), to the Cosmos, for alliance with its
energies, spreading out my visions in the books”.2 He finds that
‘the earth is a kind of hell’, through which humanity passes ‘everyday in a
kind of attitude of crucifixion hoping to come out clean at the Other End’. In
other words: life is an ‘everlasting dance’, a struggle to attain the Harmony.
It is ‘an intoxicated doubt’, ‘a relation to the question of the world as maaya against Reality.’
Hence
Anand takes up representatives of crushed humanity–a
developing child Krishan, an untouchable boy Bakha
or Bhikhu, a hill-boy Munoo,
a peasant lad Lalu or Panchi,
a middle-aged plantation worker Gangu or an English
doctor Have, a prince Victor, a trade-unionist Ananta,
and a nationalist Maqbool Sherwani–as
his heroes, identifies himself with them for his fictional experimentation in
truth, and portrays his concept of the pathetic “human dance”, or the
“body-soul drama”, in his novels. One who looks for sensational stories in his
novels will be sadly disappointed. Yet the lack of a sensational story element
is amply compensated for by a sensational technique which is his
own.
Consequent
on his stay in Gandhiji’s Sabarmati
Ashram for the Indianization of his first novel Untouchable,
Anand writes: “In fact, I was myself somewhat
transformed from the Bloomsbury intellectual which I had become in London, to a
mere emphatically self-conscious Indian”.3 Aldous
Huxley, akin to the ‘Bloomsbury Intellectuals’ and very well-known to Anand, defines his theory of ‘musicalization
of fiction’ thus:
The musicalization of fiction.
Not in the symbolist way, by subordinating sense to sound. But
on a large scale, in the construction. Meditate on Beethoven. The change of mood, the abrupt transition. More interesting
still, the modulations not merely from one key to another, but from mood to
mood. A theme is started, then developed, pushed out of shape, imperceptibly
deformed, until though still recognizably the same, it has become quite
different...put this into a novel. How? The abrupt transitions are easy enough.
All you need is a sufficiency of characters and parallel, contrapuntal plots.
While Jones is murdering a wife, Smith is wheeling the perambulator in the
park. You alternate the themes. More interesting, the modulation and variations
are also more difficult. A novelist modulates by reduplicating situations and
characters. He shows several people falling in love, or dying, praying in
different ways–dissimilars solving the same problem.
Or vice versa, similar people confronted with dissimilar problems. In
this way you can modulate through all the aspects of your theme, you can write
variations in any number of different moods. Another way: the novelist can
assume the god-like creative privilege and simply elect to consider the events
of the story in their various aspects–emotional, scientific, economic,
religious, metaphysical, etc. He will modulate from one to the other–as from
aesthetic to the physio-chemical aspects of things,
from the religious to the physiological or financial. 4
Anand’s technique appears
somewhat similar to Huxley’s musicaliztion, Indianized to a fine excess in his own ingenious way. There
are unmistakable references to the Indian nautch and nautch-girls in his novels. In his first novel, Untouchable,
describing his first female character Sohini, Anand gives an idea of the rhythm of movement, music, and
the pathos of crushed life:
her left hand on her waist, her right on the
pitcher,
and a balance in her steps like the rhythm of
a song.5
And
his next novel Coolie actually affords a fine description of the nautch that creates rhythm in the young hero: Munoo, along with his coolie friend Ratan,
visits the apartment of Piari Jan and witnesses the nautch in rapt attention:
Two
lovely apparitions darted into the salon, their legs encumbered by the
glittering sequins of silken trousers, their upright bodies swathed the thin
folds of flashing starched stiff pink aprons, and with brave smiles on their
faces which scarcely hid the pathos of their broken spirit
...
Then
the harmonium released a soft note of longing and the drums reverberated like
the slow thunder of a waterfall, and the two dancers began to sway their hands,
which had hung loose, and to move their feet, painted red with henna, so that
it seemed that they were burning with an invisible fire...
They
took up the accents of Piari’s song on their fingers
and mounting the languid notes of the music, danced with a sudden, shrill
brilliance, insinuating all the love, the passion, the lust of the poem, with
elaborate artistry, by the suggestions of their bodies, the swaying of their
tapering arms, the balanced hurrying motion of snakes and vipers, the violence
of panthers, the fine insinuating glides of innocent roes, the slow motion of
enchantresses casting spells. The fine frenzies of their dazzling olive skins
had now been transmuted from the artificiality of the make-up into the
transparency of mirrors which reflected the strange colour
of their souls. 6
Thus
the nautch is an attractive modulation of colour and sound, music and rhythm, movement and sensation,
idealistic and expressionistic, pervaded by the pathos of crushed life and
broken spirits. It is this throbbing ‘nautchization’–to
coin a symbolic term modelled on Huxley’s ‘musicalization’–that appears to be the technique adopted
for Anand’s fiction, which affords a sensational
reading.
This
technique is strikingly evident in every section of his novels, in some degree
or other, in some manner or other. Human mind is not a single melody: it is a
series of contrapuntal melodies and discords. Anand
says:
Let
your emotions, if you like, dominate your physical being; do not let them cloud
your brain or bewilder your reason.7
Reason
should be exercised to create rhythm among contrapuntals
for the prevalence of virtue in human mind. This is what Anand
tries to achieve and inculcate in the readers, as a novelist. For example: as
in a nautch, rhythmic modulation of ideas and ideals,
feelings and emotions, is the essence of Gandhiji’s
speech in Untouchable. He covers subjects like freedom and patriotism, untouchability and scavenging, casteism
and religion, purification and spiritual happiness, philosophy and politics,
non-co-operation and non-violence, etc. Similarly coloured
is his dictation to his scribe in The Sword and the Sickle:
I
am a lover of cattle. I have tried to study the cattle question. Very few
people realize that conversation of the cattle wealth of
Lalu aptly feels that
The
Mahatma seems to be pouring out his thoughts…from the sublime to the
ridiculous, and from the puerile to the profound. 9
Likewise,
the harangues of the Doctor Mahindra before Adam
Singh and Laxmi in The Old Woman and the Cow, or
those of Purun Singh Bhagat
before Ananta and Janki in The
Big Heart, or even the parting letter of Maqbool
in Death of Hero, are examples of rhythmic modulations of ideas and
ideals pervaded by a pensive touch. The very title of the novel, The Sword
and the Sickle, speaks of the imbedded technical feet: the narration is a
rhythmic alteration of the sword-like painful and the sickle-like easeful
events an dsituations, moods and theories, comic and
tragic. Two Leaves and a Bud is the best example of Anand’s technique of nautchization.’
The European club-life and the Indian hut-life, the exploitation of the bosses
and the suffering of the coolies, the lust and ire of Reggie and the pure love
of Doctor Havre and Barbara, the tragedy of Gangu and
the fiasco of the Havre-Barbara relation–these are the contrapuntal themes
woven into a seesaw-like movement. On one side are the exploiting English
bosses: on the other side are the exploited Indian coolies: in between is
Doctor Havre rolling along the plank, between the opposites, between his love
for Barbara and his sympathies for the coolies, who finally falls off the plank
sacked. The characters are also variegatedly
contrapuntal. For example: Regie is a materialist and
a lustful hedonist; Gangu passes through various
moods from theism to atheism, from godlessness to god-fearing attitude, from
acceptance to realization, from selfishness to sacrifice, illusion to reality.
But Dr Havre is a rhythmic medley of many moods and ideals as can be seen from
his notes, which Barbara reads with delight. He is a physician, an ideal
humanist, a sympathiser of the poor, a lover, a poet,
a politician; and an economist. That is why, when he is sacked, his sense of humour, the latent rhythm, keeps him intact: he accepts
fate, surrenders himself to God, and leaves for
The
Indian dance is considered holy having its origin in the graceful movements of
Lord Vishnu while killing the demons, Madhu and Kaitabha. Thus the dance is symbolic of the ‘destruction of
evil’ and the ‘construction of rhythm’ within and without. Observing the Santhal dance near Bolpur (
The
range of expression was strictly prescribed in the classical dances through
well-defined mudras or gestures, which were
symbols of certain moods and emotions but always interpreted and informed by
the genius of a dancer, whether he is the strong handsome male or the beautiful
female. The degree of coordination of the dancing foot with music is the
essence of this art, while the other arts of architecture, painting and
penmanship, help as handmaids. And
the synthesis of all these bear a deep relationship to the spirit of man, to
the whole of his nature, aspiring from imperfection to perfection through a
constant effort at awareness as in the life-process itself. 10
If
man finds out this in his self, ‘then shall his fetters fall away’.
This purification ‘from imperfection to perfection’ is what Anand
tries to achieve with his ‘nautchized fiction.’ Anand concludes:
The
dancing foot is harnessed to the service of man,
the rebel, reaching out from the world as it
exists
around us to the world of his
dreams. 11
So does Anand with his ‘nautchized
fiction’. The nautch is a product of masculine
sharpness and energy and feminine tenderness and beauty. ‘Sword
and Sickle’ or ‘Eagle and Swan’ or ‘Elephant and Lotus.’ Anand’s fiction has this androgynous, ‘Apollonian-Dionysian
or Raajasik-Saattwik’, quality. The
selection of the ‘Elephant-and-Lotus’ design by the author himself for the
jacket-emblem of his books is symbolic of the nature of art. The ‘little yellow
book’, The Lost Child–Anand’s first published
fictional work printed by his friend Eric Gill on his hand press in Pigotts to encourage him consequent on the rejection of Untouchable
by nineteen publishers–was recognized and included in Great
Short Stories of the World. ‘Yellow’ is thus a
symbol of achievement for Anand. And all his
books, after their remarkable success in the West, have their publication (Kutub-Popular) in yellow cover bearing the
Elephant-and-Lotus Emblem.
1 Quoted
by Mulk Raj Anand (From “Vision of the Sacred Dance”): Lines Written
to an Indian Air (Bombay: Nalanda Publications,
1949). p. 121.
2 Anand’s letter dated November
26, 1967, to the author.
3 Mulk Raj Anand: “The Story of My Experiments with a White
Lie”. Indian Literature (New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, Vol. X, No. 3, July-September 1967).
p. 38.
4 Aldous Huxley: Point,
Counter Point (London: Chatto and Windus, 1937). pp. 408-409. 5
5 Mulk Raj Anand: Untouchable (Bombay: Kutub-Popular,
1950). p. 19.
6 Mulk Raj Anand: Coolie (Bombay: Kutub-Popular,
1948). pp. 204-205.
7 Mulk Raj Anand: Private Life of an Indian Prince (London: The
Bodley Head, 1970). p. 329.
8 Mulk Raj Anand: The Sword and the Sickle (Bombay: Kutub-Popular, 1955). pp. 202-203.
9
Ibid. p. 203.
10
Ibid.
p. 125.
11
Ibid. p. 127.