THE THEME OF SALVATION
Treatment by Mulk Raj Anand and R. K. Narayan
K.
V. SURYANARAYANA MURTI
It
is no wonder, in whatever language Indians write, that their national themes
and ideas–notions and beliefs–creep into their creative art. And it is no
exception with regard to Indian writing in English. One of the peculiar
excellences of Indo-Anglian literature is that it is
rich with Vedantic thought which has attracted and
charmed the West immensely. While the scope for philosophic musing through
direct expression is ample in poetic rhythm, certainly it is limited in fiction
wherein the main concern is to present, in vivid hues, pictures of social
life–the bright and black in society, primarily in terms of a plot. Only an
able artist like Mulk Raj Anand or R. K. Narayan can fit
philosophy into his plot in a natural way moulding it
into a real work of art of high calibre.
The
excellence in the work Anand and Narayan,
two of the top-ranking Indo-Anglian writers, is in
that they could blend splendidly philosophy and commonplace themes. In other words philosophic ideas are presented in terms of social
plots in their novels. The Indian sense of salvation, as it were, knowingly or
unknowingly, finds expression in their novels. Their treatment of the theme of
salvation is outstanding, simply grand.
The
type of the theme of salvation adopted by both Anand
and Narayan is salvation through death. They take up
a central character as the protagonist, and present his
biography superficially; but, in fact, what is presented in suggestive terms is
the spiritual advancement of the soul–subdued
by evil, external or internal–pushing forward, towards redemption
through death. Their theme can best be described–employing Shelley’s
words–thus:
Life,
like a dome of many-coloured glass
Stains
the white radiance of eternity,
Until Death tramples it to fragments…..
when
the soul is ‘awakened from the dream of life’ into salvation:
…….the
pure spirit shall flow
Back
to the burning fountain whence it came,
A portion of the eternal.
The
mature novels of Anand and Narayan
portray this theme in suggestive terms with chiselled
perfection, while in some others of their novels we find this theme on its way
to perfection or in its raw and incomplete form. But, their approaches to the
theme are different: whereas Anand admits external
evil, evil of the society, cruelty of man to man, as the scorching torch that
affects the soul driving it to strive for salvation, what Narayan
has employed is internal evil-self-inflicted evil, that is, suicidal deception.
Both the views or ways are, of course, based on Karma
Vedanta. The two great artists are doubtless experts in their own ways in
handling their chosen approach to the theme.
In
Anand’s novels the theme mainly revolves round a
simple central character–say, a Gangu, a Bakha, or a Munoo, who symbolizes
the soul or spirit–whom the society exploits and tortures reducing him much,
more, most, and finally to nought. In other words Anand charges and blames the society as the sole cause for
the lot of the ‘downtrodden and underprivileged’ with a ‘Dickensian
piquancy’ or vehemence. This is all that is found on the surface; a deep pry
would, however, reveal the latent didactic motif and symbolic theme of
salvation. A graded evolution of the theme can be found embedded, for instance,
in his Two Leaves and a Bud, Untouchable, and Coolie. In the
first novel the theme of salvation is in its hinted-at stage; here the external
evil is the cruelty of the European bosses that pesters the hero and his
family. The novel is designed as a painful tragedy dealing with the disastrous
death of the hero. Gangu, a labourer,
along with his family thrusts himself unknown into into
an evil trap, the Macpherson Tea Estate in Assam,
which can be described aptly as Earthly Hell dominated by the Europeans, where
the labourers are literally put to tortures and never
let go out. He suffers much; his wife becomes a victim to malaria; he himself
embraces tragic death, shot dead in his attempt to protect his daughter; Leila,
from being raped by the lustful assistant manager, Reggie. The innocence of the
soul (symbolized by Gangu) is, to some extent, though
not succcssfully, hinted at, but it is lacking
in striking the purity of it. In Untouchable the span of evil
finds expansion into larger dimensions of the town, Bulashah. Cruelty is presented in the form of caste-hatred.
The hero of the novel is Bakha, a tiny young boy of
eighteen, who has to perform the strenuous job of cleaning rows of latrines
many a time, daily, single-handed. The novel narrates a day’s experiences of
the hero: the boy perceives Kali Nath, the priest, in
lust, making improper suggestions to his sister, Sohini,
which infuriated him; he attends painfully the marriage of his friend’s sister
whom he has been barred to marry simply for the reason that she belongs to a
higher caste than his own; that he has scored a goal in a hockey match played
in the afternoon against the Punjabis lead to a free fight; trying to lift up
an injured child, he has to court rebukes for having polluted the child; and,
finally, when he returns home his father, Lakha, the Jemadar of the town sweepers, charging him with the guilt
of idling away time, necks him out with which ‘Bakha’s
cup of frustration and misery is full’. Consequently, towards the end of the
book the frustrated boy is seen in a state of bewilderment and awe with his
mind torn between extremities–whether to embrace Christianity to end his caste
restrictions, or to remain in the hope of Mahatma’s casteless or creedless
society or the future advent of the machine that cleans human dirt and animal
dung. Selecting a young eighteen year-old boy as the hero, who is scarcely
aware of, or just beginning to understand, what are called sin and evil, Anand makes the boy symbolize the pure and semi-innocent
soul or spirit that suffers suffocation under the heavy weight of external
evil; suffering nourishes spiritual anguish; yet the spirit is hardly ripe for
salvation with the flame of hope for life still burning within. The soul is
left in a state of a sort of mystic dilemma in the Untouchable.
Anand’s handling of the theme
of salvation reaches its apogee in his mature novel, Coolie; the
treatment is simply superb. Really, it is the prose epic of modern
With
the hero, the hill-boy Munoo, we move too, and follow
his fortunes or rather misfortunes first with his uncle and aunt in his village,
Bilaspur; then with the Bank Sub-Accountant’s family
at Sham Nagar, where Munoo works
as a servant; then with Munoo’s benefactor, Prabha, and his wife in the incredible Cat Killers’ Lane in
the old feudal city, Daulatpur; We are presently lost
with Munoo in Bombay’s slums and chawls
and noise and madness and general filth and oases of splendour;
and, lastly, with Mrs. Mainwaring at Simla, as her page and rickshaw-puller, where he dies of
consumption.
The
boy who wants to thrive runs from place to place, to
escape from one place of evil to another; wherever he goes he is exploited,
made to starve and suffer. It is something like the soul’s journey through a
life’s desert–where there is all trouble, wild winds, sand- storms, hot sands
and scorching heat–running after hope for salvation. Munoo,
indeed, comes across some oases, oases-like good characters, in his journey of
life, who are also disabled in the hands of the greedy, well-to-do and
high-handed members of society. All this forms the superstructure or the
spectacular part that meets the eye immediately in concrete terms. But, the
basic core, the grandeur, of Anand’s art is the
latent theme of salvation embedded. Munoo, the
innocent orphan-boy–who knows, nor tries to know, no evil short-cuts to thrive–symbolizes
the pure and simple soul; external evil, exploitation or cruelty of society,
haunts the soul; frustration and ever-increasing physical suffering result in a
gradual spiritual advancement of the soul; the pure and innocent soul finally
attains redemption into salvation through death. In fact, our scriptures say
that the souls of children that die as children early are as pure as flowers
and reach the One untainted with sin or evil. In this novel, the symbolic theme
of salvation is unmistakably evident. The irony of fate, the note of tragic
death awaiting Munoo, is hinted at frequently, for
instance, at the very beginning of the novel, in his aunt Gujri’s
words: ‘Munoo ohe Munooa oh Mundu! Where have you
died? Where have you drifted, you of the evil star?’ It is also seen in the
boy’s own words, on the eve of his departure to Sham Nagar,
to Jay Singh, the village landlord’s son: ‘No, never; I never
want to come back. At one stage in his journey of life, while travelling in the special train of a circus company to
Bombay, the stern-willed boy murmurs within himself:
No,
I would kill myself rather than go back. I would prefer to die…..
The
rapid spiritual advancement of the soul seeking the Goal is beautifully
suggested in the final chapter that it forms the central core conveying the
theme of salvation. Almost at the very beginning of the final chapter Anand lets us conceive the sense of frustration when the
soul begins to review the past with a mood of surrender to the Supreme creeping
in:
But
really he was mentally and physically broken. And as he thought of the
conditions under which he had lived, of the intensity of the struggle, and the
futility of the waves of revolt falling upon the hard rock of privilege and
possession, as he thought of Ratan and Hari and Lakshmi, and the riots,
he felt sad and bitter and defeated, like an old man.
Next,
for the first time, nearing his end, the sense of God occupies the precious
chambers of the boy’s mind as he goes up to Simla in
the Chevrolet of Mrs. Mainwaring:
He
did not want to make fun of God, though, because he saw some of the coolies and
hillmen trudging up to Simla,
borne down beneath the sacks of food-stuffs on their backs, and he thought it
was the blessing of the Almighty that he sat comfortably, being carried in a
motor-car. It was nice to be hurried along, past trees and houses, ponies and
men, up, up and up to the heavenly heights above the clouds.
Beauty
replaces zest for life, the boy attains negative capability, finds contentment,
rather becomes quite excited about his job–the strenuous job of pulling the
rickshaw of his pseudo-charitable mistress, Mrs. Mainwaring.
In other words the struggling spirit of the soul vanishes yielding place to
solace in discharging due Karma. Physically, to the strenuous,
bone-breaking, blood-consuming job of rickshaw-pulling, the tiny little boy
succumbs, clasps consumption and becomes weak day by day, step by step, with
increasing acceleration. Conversely to the gradual decay of the physical being,
the soul, in the clutches of a dreadful disease, attains perfection, reaches
such spiritual heights that the boy finds no difference between good and evil;
he even forgives the sin-clad bitch, Mrs. Mainwaring,
in his heart. And Anand’s portrayal of this stage of the
soul is unforgettable:
Munoo had borne a
resentment against her during the later stages of her friendship with Major Marchant. And when he had begun to bleed, and the knowledge
of death confronted him, he had hated her for a while. But now that he was
actually sick in bed, vaguely torn between the fear of dying and the hope of
living, something happened to him. He felt docile and good and kind towards her
and every one else. It was as if the nerves of his body in their gradual
weakening had begun to accept the humiliation which in the pride of their
functioning they had never acknowledged.
Thus,
the soul has reached a stage of perfection to invite even death joyfully.
Finally, the last two short paragraphs so exquisitely, so profoundly, suggest
the final catastrophe or the awakening of the purified and innocent soul into
salvation redeemed through death:
Munoo clutched at Mohan’s hand and felt the warm blood in his veins like a tide reach out to distances to which it had never gone before.
But
in the early hours of one unreal white night he passed away–the tide of his
life having reached back to the deeps.
While
in Anand’s art external evil is found set as the
invisible force for the spiritual advancement of the soul, Narayan
chooses the internal or self-inflicted evil, one’s own Karma, that
flags, as the means of purifying the soul, giving birth to spiritual anguish.
The purified soul achieves maturity, sheds off the robes of self and physical
being, and finally flies to the heights. This, indeed, is the quintessence of Narayan’s art. Like Anand, Narayan too gives prominence to the superstructure, the
physical plot, and reveals the theme of salvation in symbolic or suggestive
terms. The theme of salvation through death reaches the climax in his mature
novel, The Guide; and in his other novels this theme receives raw or
incomplete treatment. In Narayan’s novels again we
have a central character–say, a Sampath, a Margayya, a Raju, round whom the
theme circles–who does try to overreach, to exploit the society around him, the
men and women whom he comes into touch with. The protagonists, in order to fill
up their cups of craze, try to fly high,
so high on their wings of evil, that at one level they merely scorch their
wings and in vain they retreat to where they start having lost the ego of the
soul. This is what we find embeded in the roles of Sampath of Mr. Sampath, and
Margayya of the Financial Expert. In other
words Narayan, in these novels, portrays the
ambitious flight of the self in pursuit of physical or material gratification
and finally presents a tranquil soul frustrated and devoid of ego, yet hardly
ripe for salvation.
But,
his Guide is a pioneering effort and grand success dealing with the
theme of salvation through death in terms of a physical plot. The novel gives
the biography of the hero, Raju, that symbolizes the
journey of the soul from mundane levels to spiritual heights finally redeemed
through death. The plot-content of The Guide is simply this (in the
words of Prof. Iyangar):
Raju is a romantic doubled
with a rascal like his fictional predecessors, Mangayya
and Sampath. Raju too plays
many ‘parts’….Trying to help a rich visitor, Marco, in his researches, Raju is involved in a tangle of new relationships. Rosie,
Marco’s wife, becomes Raju’s lover. Abandoned by
Marco, Rosie realizes, with Raju’s help, her ambition
of becoming a dancer. But his possessive instinct finally betrays him into a
criminal action, and he is charged and convicted of forgery. Coming out of the
jail, he cuts off all connections with the past and sets up as a sort of
ascetic or Mahatma. Once again he is caught in the coils of his own
self-deception, and he is obliged to undertake a twelve-day fast to end a
drought that threatens the district with a famine. In vain he tells his chief
‘disciple’, Velan, the whole truth about himself and
Rosie, and about the crash and the incarceration. But nobody would now believe
that he is–or has been–anyone other than a Mahatma. He has made his bed, and he
must perforce lie on it. We are left to infer that, on the last day of the
fast, he dies opportunely, a martyr.
The
novel, in truth, describes Raju’s life from birth to
death punctuated into two halves–the span before Raju’s
release from jail and that after. ‘Technically, The Guide is an advance
on the earlier novels: the present and the past are cunningly jumbled to
produce a somewhat tantalizing effect’. The narrative technique
employed–albeit, ingenious indeed–is no alien one grafted to the plot;
obviously, it is conversant with, rather natural to, the mode of the latent
symbolic theme of salvation. The essential part of the theme is the germination
of spiritual anguish, the culmination, and the sacred redemption of the soul
through death, that is, the later half of the hero’s life after his
release from the prison. As a sign of the spiritual anguish set in, or
beginning to set in, the sinner is to review his sinful past and know his own
follies and foibles, when the spirit unconsciously surrenders itself to the
Divine. But, the novelist should keep on narrating the current events essential
to the theme. So, the past is presented as reviewed by the sinner, the hero, in
the first person; the present is told in the third person by the author. Quite
aptly to the theme, the present and the past are to be narrated alternatingly in bits, and Narayan
did this artistically hardly clogging the reader’s interest.
The
novel begins strikingly with the current phase of the hero, with Raju seated on the steps of a lone old temple in the attire
of a swami cleanly shaven, and Velan the first
devotee–in other words Raju’s
guiding-destiny–approaching him. The frustrated Raju
released from jail has actually intended a real life anew. But, fate hardly
allows him. It is all Karma driving the soul to the goal, and Narayan voices this at one stage in the novel using Rosie
as the transmitter to his voice: of Raju, she merely
said, ‘I felt all along you were not doing the right things. This is Karma. What
can we do?’ The foul career with a reaped-consequence that passed, and the
present trap designed by destiny in the guise of the villagers’ faith and
worshipping, in which he has one step placed already, create a sort of
stunning awe in him; a sense of spiritual anguish flashes in his mind as a
result; the hero reviews his past frankly; that is really needed for
self-awareness and purification of the soul. In vain he reveals his true self
before Velan:
I
am not a saint, Velan, I’m just an ordinary human
being like anyone else. Listen to my story, you will know it yourself…..
Destiny
leads the soul forward; he is obliged to undertake a fast to end a drought and
threat of famine. ‘All thoughts of tongue and stomach’ are erased from his
mind. The fact that the acceptance and executing of the fast has stimulated the
spiritual advancement of the soul, Narayan describes
finally in suggestive terms:
This
resolution gave him a peculiar strength. He developed on those lines: ‘If by
avoiding food I should help the trees bloom, and the grass grow, why not do it thoroughly?
For the first time in his life he was making earnest effort, for the first time
he was learning the thrill of full application, outside money and love; for the
first time he was doing a thing in which he was not personally interested. He
felt suddenly so enthusiastic that it gave him a new strength to go through
with the ordeal. The fourth day of his fast found him quite sprightly. He went
down to the river, stood facing up stream with his eyes shut, and repeated the
litany. It was no more than a supplication to the heavens to send down rain and
save humanity. It was set in a certain rhythmic chant, which lulled his senses
and awareness, so that as he went on saying it over and over again, the world
around became a blank.
The
passage thus suggests that the soul is completely purged of ego. Mechanical
action is transformed into sacred ritual; the soul is fully purified with the
fat. Physical being decays step by step; the regenerated soul reaches higher
and higher heights transcending mundane levels. And Raju
realizes within: ‘I am only doing what I have to do.’ Now comes the finale: Raju declines the Government doctor’s request to break the
fast; the soul hurries past the embraces of death. The redemption through
death, the awakening of the purified and inspired soul into Eternity, is so
beautifully described by Narayan in Raju’s end, at the end, in a tantalizing passage .
He
is very weak….He gets up to his feet. He had to be held by Velan
and another on each side. In the profoundest silence the crowd followed him
down….Raju I could not walk, but he insisted upon
pulling himself along all the same. He panted with the effort. He went down the
steps of the river, halting for breath on each step, and finally reached his
basin of water. He stepped into it, shut his eyes and turned towards the
mountain, his lips muttering the prayer. The morning sun was out by now; a
great shaft of light illuminated the surroundings. It was difficult to hold Raju on his feet, as he had a tendency to flop down. They
held him as if he were a baby. Raju opened his eyes,
looked about, and said, ‘Velan, it’s raining in the
hills, I can feel it coming up under my feet, up my legs–’ and with that he
sagged down.
The
spirit achieves the purity of a ‘baby’, and the final glow of the purified
spirit is suggested in ‘a great shaft of light illuminated the surroundings.’
The physical being has sagged down; the inner soul flies to Eternity. However
much sinful one has been in his life, repentance purifies the soul; and a
single, whole-hearted, pious act coupled with devotion is enough to purge off
all sin and regenerate the soul, which at the end is awakened from this dream
of life into salvation through death–this is what, indeed, our scriptures say.
And Narayan seems to preach and teach this simple
didactic truth in effective terms through his works, in his Guide in
particular:
It
is, thus, obvious that whereas Anand has employed
extern evil, Narayan seeks the internal evil, and
repentance as the means of purifying the soul for salvation. Anand’s job seems rather easy for he straightaway takes up
a pure and innocent character (usually a boy) representing the soul and
concentrates much, on deriding the society as the external evil pestering the
spirit, and in laying bare the miserable lot of the downtrodden. In other words
in his novels–as in Raja Rao’s–there is much
spectacular that meets the eye at once. Narayan’s
task is rather difficult, since he (generally taking up a grown-up man as the
hero symbolizing the soul) has to present the various developing phases–the
sinner’s evil life, repentance, achieving self-awareness, regeneration, and,
finally, salvation. Narayan’s novels provide food for
thought and meditation. The apparent simplicity poses a deceptive immaturity;
but, he, in reality, could succeed in effectively integrating the material and
the spiritual more than any of our novelists could. His novels are masterpieces
finely spun. They bear ‘the Narayan trade
marks–unhurried pace, unfailing good humour,
kindliness, gentle satire.’ Both Narayan and Anand are the storytellers, par excellence. Both,
thus, could successfully blend philosophy and human drama, could supremely
paint the former in symbolic colours of the latter.
Dickens has exposed and scoffed at the evil society–say, in his Oliver Twist–like
Anand; but what Dickens or even Hardy perhaps
failed at, or hardly attempted, Anand could achieve:
to raise human drama to the heights of spiritual significance in novel. And
what Anand has just achieved Narayan
could perfectly chisel and paint in lovely colours.
And there is nothing strange in that Narayan could
win Sahitya Akademi Trophy
in 1960, warm tributes from the West, and the splendid applause of Somerset Maugham (who paid a personal visit to Narayan
in India at Mysore), Graham Greene, and I. A.
Richards in particular.