SOCIO-POLITICAL
CONCERNS IN THE NOVELS OF
Dr
MULK RAJ ANAND
SHYAM M. ASNANI
Dr
K. R. S. Iyengar’s pioneering and perceptive study (Indian
Writing in English) has firmly established the existence of the tradition
of Indian Writing in English. Its achievements and a measure of significance
can no longer be challenged. It is now possible, thanks largely to his efforts,
to make further specialised studies in certain
individual aspects in the field. An attempt here will be made to study the
socio-political concerns in the first three novels (trilogy) of Dr Mulk Raj
Anand.
The
emergence of the pre-independence Indo-English novel out of its early
romantic-idealistic arcadia into the expansive landscape of realism runs
parallel to the gradual development of a national ideology from its early phase
of reformist exuberance to the growth of a revolutionary consciousness among
the common masses of India, that they had to struggle relentlessly for their
emancipation from the steel frame of their politico-economic exploitation by a
foreign imperialism as also from the colossal weight of old tradition,
hide-bound casteism and the die-hard dogma of
religious conformism.
The
struggle for independence in
Under
Gandhiji’s moral-cum-spiritual leadership, the freedom movement percolated, for
the first time, to the very grass-roots of Indian society. Parallel to the
struggle for political freedom started another struggle for freedom on the
social plane. That was a fight against superstition, the caste system and
untouchability, poverty, illiteracy, the erosion of religious belief–that were
sapping the very vitality of our society.
No
writer, writing in those decades or writing about that period, could avoid
reflecting this upsurge in his work. Fiction, of all literary forms, is
intimately concerned with social conditions and values, and at this time,
Indian society, “galvanized into a new social and political awareness, was
bound to seek creative expression for its new consciousness and the novel has,
in all ages, been a handy instrument for this purpose.l
The socio-political movement, which had caught the imagination of the entire
nation, inspired the Indo-English writers as well, who had an added advantage
of Western liberal education. Among the significant works of fiction inspired
by this struggle are the novels like, Kandan
the Patriot by K. S. Venkataramani, Inqilab
by K. A. Abbas, Waiting for the Mahatma by
R. K. Narayan, Kanthapura
by Raja Rao, Untouchable by M. R. Anand, Into the Sun by
Frieda H. Das, Motherland by C. N. Zutsi, We Never Die by D. F. Karaka.
The
aim of this study is to see how these political and social concerns are
reflected in the first three significant works of Mulk Raj Anand.
Paradoxical
as it may sound, the dynamics of Gandhian thought
helped open the way for the influx of Marxism in the literary field in
Mulk
Raj Anand, like Prem Chand, passionately concerned
with the villages, with the ferocious poverty, squalor and backwardness coupled
with gross ignorance and the cruelties of caste, with orphans, untouchables and
urban labourers, took upon himself the task of
attacking social snobbery and prejudice; urging for a larger outlook more
tolerance, more intimate and benevolent understanding and more self-sacrifice.
The Indian life that he depicts in his novels is that of outcastes, peasants, soldiers, the depressed and suppressed ones of the society.
He has resurrected the outcastes, the labourers, the
farmers and the bottom-dog of his country from the obscure lanes and alleys of
the hamlets, villages and small towns. Like Prem Chand
in Hindi, Anand is the first of the Indian novelists in English to have written
of this motley crowd, which had hitherto been largely ignored by the then
Indian writers.
Anand
himself makes it clear in his preface to the second edition of the Two
Leaves and a Bud: “In so
far, however, as my work broke new ground and represented a departure from the
tradition of previous Indian fiction, where the pariahs and the bottom-dogs had
not been allowed to enter the sacred precincts of the novel, in all their
reality, it seemed to become significant and drew the attention of the critics,
particularly in Europe which only knew Omar Khayam,
Li Po and Tagore but very little or nothing about the sordid or colourful lives of the millions of Asia.”
Anand,
“a son of a copper-smith turned soldier, and of a peasant mother,” knew, saw
and felt fully and intimately the rural life of the
All
these heroes, as the other men and women who had emerged in my novels and short
stories, were dear to me, because they were the reflections of the real people
I had known during my childhood and youth. And I was only repaying the debt of
gratitude lowed them for much of the inspiration they had given me to mature
into manhood, when I began to interpret their lives in my writing. They were not mere
phantoms...They were the flesh of my flesh and blood of my blood, and obsessed
me in the way in which certain human beings obsess an artist’s soul. And I was
doing no more than what a writer does when he seeks to interpret the truth from
the realities of his life.
Anand,
throughout his novels, has, by implication, been impressing on his readers to
recognize fundamental principles of human living and exercise vigilance in
regard to the real enemies of freedom and socialism. He has relentlessly been
advocating the need to help raise the untouchables, the peasants, the serfs,
the coolies, and the suppressed members of the society, to human dignity and
self-awareness in view of the abjectness, ignorance, apathy and despair they
are sunk in.
The
first trilogy–Untouchable, Coolie and
Two Leaves and a Bud–deals
with the misery and the wretchedness of the crushed and poor and their struggle
for a better life. His subsequent novels are almost a variation on the same
theme and are intended to bring home to the reader the plight of the
ever-burdened peasant who is powerless to fight superstition and social
convention and who is baulked at every step in his aspirations for a better
life.
Bakha, an eighteen year old boy, like his father Lakha, a sweeper, a cleaner of latrines, is regarded as an
outcaste by the society. Anand, as has been suggested by Prof. H. M. Williams, “exemplifies
the problem of ‘untouchability’, the treatment of the latrine-cleaning class
condemned to isolation and deprivation as handlers of excrement; he exposes
this as a social evil and suggests its remedy”.2 The method is to
narrate the single day’s events in Bakha’s life.
Sturdy, genial, easy-going, athletic Bakha lives and
works in the army camp pathetically aspiring to be as much like the sahibs as
possible and playing hockey with their children. But early on the fateful day,
he touches a Brahmin by accident and is reviled as a disgusting creature who has made the Brahmin unclean. He then sustains the
terrible shocks of indictment quite a number of times: he is abused and slapped
for polluting a merchant, he is chased out of a temple by a priest who has been
trying to molest his sister; he receives a shower of abuses for polluting an
injured child in his attempt to help the wounded child. An anguished cry comes
of his mouth:. “I only get abuse and derision wherever
I go. Pollution, pollution, I do nothing else but pollute people...” For a
moment he stands aghast possessed by his rebellious self. His whole countenance
lights with fire, the strength, the power of his giant body glistens with the desire for revenge in his eyes, while
horror, rage, indignation sweep over his frame. But
this momentary rage and revolt, soon evaporate when he
finds that he is still too much bound to his low-caste-status. His anger
and fury can only make him painfully realize that his rebellion would lead him
nowhere as there is a futility written large on his fate. So in the highest
moment of his strength, the slave in him asserts itself, and he lapses back, “wild
with torture, biting his lips, ruminating his grievances.” He walks out
frustrated and highly disappointed. Colonel Hutchinson, the Salvationist, with
his shield of casteless society and salvation for all; Gandhiji with his strong
dislike for untouchability as the greatest blot on Hinduism and his views that
untouchables are in fact the Harijans–“men of God”,
and then Iqbal Nath Sarshar with his new machine (the flush) that “will clean
dung without anyone having to handle it”–all these three encounters raise hopes
in him for a while. But he returns home, to his wretched bed, smothered by the
misery, the anguish of the morning’s memories, thinking intently of the
Mahatma, the Christ and the Machine in turn, but preferring none of the three, which
perhaps reflects the fundamental crisis in the mind of the writer himself and
is responsible for the gloomy end of the novel.
Untouchable
is thus
a forthright condemnation of a system which has, for ages, killed human dignity
and warped the man, the hideous monster called caste that has seized Indian life
in its strangling grasp and we have come to accept the snobbery, the hypocrisy,
insularity and stratification of society based on ideas of high and low, thus
making a mockery of the great teachings of our holy scriptures that we chant on
all auspicious occasions.
As
has already been said by me in my paper on Anand’s Untouchable,
3 Bakha is a prototype of millions of
untouchables in
Anand
does not seem to be satisfied with an understanding of the society in its
exterior aspects, its institutions, its problems. He seems to be possessed by a
desire, although vague, to seize and express the deeper spiritual reality
beneath the flux of bourgeois living. He, therefore, criticises
social maladies, human hypocrisies, and individual idiosyncrasies.
In Coolie Anand shows his concern for the savagely
neglected, despised and maltreated poor with an angry lack of resignation.
Munoo, a poor orphan hill-boy, verdant and innocent,
underfed and ill-treated by his aunt leaves the native village to find work and
see the world. The very first encounter with reality shatters his dreams.
Employed in the house of a bank clerk, Munoo with his
inborn naive gaiety amuses and entertains the employer’s daughter by dancing
like a monkey for her, but is interfered by he shrewish and vindictive housewife
who ruthlessly destroys his happiness by making him realize his position in the
world: “He had no right to join the laughter of his superiors. He was to be a
slave, a servant who should do the work, all the odd jobs, someone to be
abused, even beaten...”
Constant
abuses and frenzied rage from his frightening and frowning mistress makes him
flee to work in a primitive pickle factory in Daulatpur
where the dispute between the two partners leaves him desolate, unshielded and
helpless. Exasperated with the frantic competition and cunningness among the
fellow-coolies, he finds himself an utter failure in the job of a market
porter. The satire here becomes more general, directed not at one or two
examples of vice and folly but at man’s inhumanity to man. The generous but
feckless Prabha, Munoo’s
protector and surrogate father, is betrayed by a cruel paranoiac foreman,
harried by an absurd retired judge called Sir Todar
Mal (a Dickensian grotesque who emerges with considerable comic power), and is
finally nearly beaten to death by the police acting with absurd and habitual
brutality”.6 This apparent and senseless deprivation and injustice
drives Munoo to still another adventure. After
working in vain as a market porter and sleeping on the road pavements, Munoo, with the help of an elephant-driver of a circus
company is stowed away to
Anand’s indictment is against the society as a whole,
society that “breeds such prejudice and selfishness and cruelty.” Poverty
diffused all over
There
are only two kinds of people in the world: the rich and the poor and between
the two there is no connection. The rich and the powerful, the magnificent and
the glorious, whose opulence is built on robbery and theft and open war-fare,
are honoured and admired by the whole world and by
themselves. You, the poor and the humble, you the meek and
the gentle, wretched that you are swindled out of your rights, and broken in
body and soul. You are respected by no one and you do not respect yourselves.
(p. 55)
The
charm of the book lies in Munoo’s innocence, “in his
naive warm-heartedness, his love and comradeship, his irrepressible curiosity
and zest for life”–the instinctive urge to live, to go on doing something in
order to avoid starving. The Bombay scene with toiling, suffering, struggling,
starving masses is at once vivid and realistic, where Munoo,
an insignificant part of the millions of half-fed and half-clad workers is “no
more than a speck in this tide of humanity”, and it is precisely for this
reason that the story does not end here and the author transports him to the
holiday-resort where he regains his identity. Coolie, to quote another
critic, is a “cosmic painting of the lives of thousands of orphans, coolies,
boy-servants, factory-workers and rickshaw-pullers, their health running down “through
the hour-glass of Time.” The novel is a treatise on social evil at its sundry
levels and phases”. 7
Deeply
moved by the abject poverty and innocence of
Two
Leaves and a Bud describes
the pathetic conditions of the labourers in
tea-gardens where the poor Indian coolies work as slaves along with their wives
and children. It is a sad and appalling tale of the crushed humanity, of their sighs
and tears.
Gangu, a middle-aged farmer in the Punjab, tempted by false
promises, is transported to
Coolies’
joint approach to the authorities for a fair deal is mistaken to be a
rebellion. Army is summoned, aeroplanes machinegun
the terror-striken coolies and grind them down into
submission and order is restored. De la Havre, a sympathetic doctor, a “walking
capsule of humanism, socialism, progressivism and left-wing idealism” has to
miss his job and his love (Barabara) because
according to the planter’s code, his sympathies were wasted on the wrong
people.
Gangu feels bewildered, lonely and lost when his wife Sajani dies of malaria. He makes frantic efforts to borrow
money for the funeral expenses and is kicked out, beaten and abused. He comes
back almost broken to Buta, the Garden Sardar, who had brought him here on fabulous promises:
“The
Sahib will not give me a loan,” Gangu said, “I have
just been. He beat me for coming out of quarantine. Oh, friend Buta Ram, if only I had known things were going to turn out
this way, I wouldn’t have come here.” And he took his hand to his eyes to wipe
the tears that had welled up in them with the reproach against the Sardar that he had suppressed into self-pity.
These
natural, unforced and unpretentious words successfully convey the genuine “pathos,
the suffering and the anguish of the hero”.9
Gangu with his cold passivity, his tender loyalties, his
compassion and depth of suffering, symbolic of the Indian peasantry, is by now
adept to watch the violent play of God, the storm and the rain washing away the
meagre harvest of paddy with an almost imperturbable calm, as if in the moment of
his uttermost anguish and despair, he had been purged of his fear of the
inevitable. Hopelessly embedded in the toils of a system that can only throttle
the life, Gangu has learnt to accept the rigours of life with complete resignation and stoical
serenity:
And,
as in the old days in his village, so now he plodded on like an ox all day,
knowing all in his crude bovine way, grasping the distinction between himself
and his masters, conscious even of the days when he was young and had kicked
against the pricks and the proddings of the rod, of
the hate, the fear and the sorrow he had known, but detached and forgetful in
the Nirvanic bliss of emptiness where the good and
evil of fortune seemed the equally just retributions, Omniscient Providence, of
whom Siva and Vishnu and
The
novel ends with the murder of Gangu in his attempt to
rescue his daughter from the enticing trap of the sexy and lustful Reggie Hunt.
The white jury that tries the case finds Hunt “not guilty” of murder by one
vote and not guilty to culpable homicide by a majority of vote. Evil is thus
shown triumphing and leaving no room for goodness in life.
De
la Havre, Anand’s “spokesman character”, with his
idealist dream of a “Communist type revolution and recognizes imperialism as an
egregious form of capitalist exploitation”.l0 The him the
socio-political revolution is the only way to emancipate the vast masses,
prisoners of so many chains, bearing the physical signs of grief, of lassitude,
even of death. He does protect the coolies and encourage them to resist the
onslaughts of gross injustices, insults, and indignities they are destined to
suffer at the hands of the British planters and rich Indian exploiters, but
Anand through Dr Havre can easily be seen to be ventilating his anger and pity
at these swarming, under-nourished, bleary, worm-eaten millions of India suffer
so. He surmises:
Is
it because the festering swamps of the tropics breed disease and that they
cannot check the tribulations of destiny? Certainly it seemed to me so, at
first–that fate had here conspired with the seasons to obliterate everything
capriciously...But why didn’t it occur to anyone the simple, obvious thing that
people don’t need Marx to realize here. The black coolies clear the forests,
plant the fields, toil and garner the harvest, while all the money-grubbing,
slave-driving, soulless managers and directors draw their salaries and
dividends and build up monopolies. Therein lies the necessity of revolution in
this country...(p. 122/123).
Anand
has been blamed for his partisan views of the Britishers.
The novel, according to Professor H. M. Williams, is on one level a crude piece
of propaganda portraying the British as vicious and absurd. Admitting that the
novel is not as best as his early ones, Anand himself offers his defence in the introduction to the 1951 edition of the
book:
I
do not think that it is one of the best of my early novels. It is perhaps
better written, and technically, it is more complex than Untouchable or Coolie
because I tried to evoke in it in varying moods of the beautiful Eastern
Indian landscape and felt the passions with an intensity which owed not a
little to the fact that it was a real story which I was writing in thinly
veiled fiction. But I confess, that, as I got into the book, I was biased in favour of my Indian characters and tended to caricature the
Englishmen and English women who play such a vital part in this book ... And
the truth has to be told about the relations of the blacks and whites,
unpalatable as it might be, even as the disease of serfdom had to be analysed in Russia before it could be eradicated. And if in
so doing, one’s art spills over into an amorphous passion then, well, that
should be forgiven in an age which so often excuses cynicism and contempt and
even violence on the other side...” (Introduction, p. vii)
Able, spirited and bold as this defence is, it does not answer all the doubts and
questionings. In his over-enthusiastic defiance of the exploitation, Anand
makes Gangu brood in an intellectual manner which
never seeming true to his character, sounds a crude piece of propaganda inartistically
thrust over through the protagonist’s mouth:
I
have always said it and I say it now again that, though the earth is bought and
sold and confiscated, God never meant that to happen, for He does not like some
persons to have a comfortable living and the others to suffer from dire
poverty. He has created land enough to maintain all men and yet many die of
hunger, and most live under a heavy burden of poverty all their lives, as if
the earth were made for a few and not for all men! (p. 247/248):
Lapses such as these are there, but they never
infiltrate the total artistic beauty and effect, for the crude part of overt
propaganda is made subservient to the human content by telling the unvarnished
tale of plantation life in the thirties. Anand has therefore ably withstood the
attack of the critics whom he would like to remind that “the catharsis of a
book lies ultimately in the pity, the compassion and understanding of an artist
and not in his partiality.”
A
study of the trilogy gives an unmistakable feeling, that Anand is a serious and
committed novelist with definite axe to
grind. What he is committed to and
what he grinds with his axe is obviously the wishful eradication of the
prevalent prejudice and indignation against the under-privileged and under-dog
of the society and pleads for the bettering of their lot.
A
wishful thinking for the removal of all artificial barriers between classes and
masses prompts the author to insist on the innate humanity of man. He is almost baffled by
age-long social inertia, and pins his faith not on any future rational
re-organization of the society, but on elemental human goodness and sincerity.
The
indirect criticism in his novels of the emotional regidity
and self-centredness of the superior castes gives
place to a more frontal attack
on the illogicalities and injustices of society. But this does not mean that his novels are a
dissertation on socia-ethical problem, rather an
illuminating document of human interest. He has pointed out social conflicts
and ills, not because he
champions any abstract social theory, but because he has seen and experienced
and felt them intimately in his own surroundings.
Anand
in his novels, attacking social snobbery and prejudice, urges for a larger outlook, more tolerance,
more intimate and benevolent understanding and more self-sacrifice. He seems to
stress one thing to be sure–that
intolerance and egoistic feelings are at the root of all our social and personal troubles.
Anand,
through his creative writing, as he expresses in his Apology for Heroism (p.
139), has been able to live through the experience of other people and realise what silent
passions burst, in their minds, what immediate and ultimate sorrows possess
them where they want to go and
how they grapple in their own ways, with their destinies. He has tried in this
sense to express his passionate love for
the suffering people without caring for the misunderstanding and the
ridicule of those who are
better situated in social life and call his
pre-occupation with the outcastes, the disinherited peasants, and the eternally
wronged women as a morbid,
sentimentalist pre-occupation with these “ignorant people.”
Through
his pleadings for an unquenchable and unshakable faith in the elemental
goodness of man and power of love, a faith which has had all falsity and
sentimentality purged of by the fires of intense suffering, what Anand wanted
to achieve has been achieved. And that in itself is a unique contribution to
the Indian novel in English.
References
l Dr M. K. Naik’s essay on Gandhiji and the Indian Writing in
English. Banasthali Patrika,
special issue on Mahatma Gandhi. July
1970. p. 55.
2 Prof. H. M. Williams: Studies in Modern
Indian Novel in English. Writers
Workshop,
3 Shyam M. Asnani: Untouchable and Mulk Raj Anand’s
Untouchable. Published in the Banasthali
Patrika. Jan. ’71.
4 Dr K. R. S. Iyengar: Indian
Writing in English.
5 The Times of
6 Studies in Modern
Indian Novel in English.
7 Prof. K. Kurmanadham:
The Novels of Dr M. R. Anand. Triveni (Machilipatnam),
Oct. ’67.
8 Studies in Modern
Indian Fiction in English.
9 Dr Saros Cowasjee :
Anand’s Two Leaves and a Bud. Published in the Indian Literature (Q). Vol. XVI, No.
3 and 4, July, Dec. ’73.
l0 Studies in Modern
Indian Fiction in English.
* References to the texts are from the Kutub Popular (