Mulk Raj Anand Biography and latest books by Mulk Raj Anand

Mulk Raj Anand (12 December 1905 – 28 September 2004) was an Indian writer in English, popular for his depiction of the lives of the poorer castes in Indian society. One of the pioneers of Indo-Anglian fiction, he, together with R.K. Narayan, Ahmed Ali and Raja Rao, was one of the first India-based writers in English to gain an international readership.

Born in Peshawar, he studied at Khalsa College, Amritsar, before moving to England where he attended University College London and Cambridge University, graduating with a PhD in 1929. During this time he forged friendships with members of the Bloomsbury Group. He spent some time in Geneva, lecturing at the League of Nations\' School of Intellectual Cooperation.

Anand\'s literary career was launched by family tragedy. His first prose essay was a response to the suicide of an aunt, who had been excommunicated by his family for sharing a meal with a Muslim. His first main novel, The Untouchable, published in 1935, was a chilling exposé of the day-to-day life of a member of India\'s untouchable caste. It is the story of a single day in the life of Bakha, a toilet-cleaner, who accidentally bumps into a member of a higher caste. Bakha searches for a salve to the tragedy of the destiny into which he was born, talking with a Christian missionary, listening to a speech about untouchability by Mahatma Gandhi and a subsequent conversation by two educated Indians, but by the end of the book Anand suggests that it is technology, in the form of the newly introduced flush toilet that may be his saviour by eliminating the need for a caste of toilet cleaners.

This simple book, which captured the puissance of the Punjabi and Hindi idiom in English, was widely acclaimed and Anand won the reputation of being India\'s Charles Dickens.

With the publication of Untouchable, Anand had firmly associated himself with that brand of writers who saw ‘political, social and human causes as genuine impulses for the novel and poetry’. For Anand literature should be an interpretation of the truth of people’s lives. It should be written from felt experience.

Being influenced by Gandhi, he came to his ashram in Ahmedabad, where he showed Gandhi drafts of his novel. Gandhi was extremely critical because he claimed there was too much of the ‘Bloomsbury’ feel to it, on which he was probably right. While in Ahmedabad, Anand lived like a true disciple and did his share of cleaning the toilets – an act seen as defilement for a caste Hindu. In this period Anand revised his book considerably and when Forster read it his retort to those who complained about the ‘dirt’ in the novel, was that “the book seems to me indescribably clean…it has gone straight to the heart of its subject and purified it”.

Inevitably, Anand, who spent half his time in London and half in India, was drawn to the Indian independence movement. At the same time, he also supported freedom elsewhere around the globe and even travelled to Spain to volunteer in the Spanish Civil War. He spent World War II working as a scriptwriter for the BBC in London, where he became a friend of author George Orwell. He was a friend of Picasso and had Picasso paintings in his collection.

Anand returned to India in 1946, and continued with his prodigious literary output there. His work includes poetry and essay on a wide range of subjects, as well as autobiographies and novels. Prominent among his novels are The Village (1939), Across the Black Waters (1940), The Sword and the Sickle (1942), all written in England, and Coolie (1936), The Private Life of an Indian Prince (1953), perhaps the most important of his works written in India. He also founded a literary magazine, Marg, and taught in various universities. During the 1970s, he worked with the International Progress Organization (I.P.O.) on the issue of cultural self-comprehension of nations.

Private Life of an Indian Prince, was more autobiographical in nature, and in 1950 Anand embarked on a project to write a seven-part autobiography, beginning with Seven Summers. One part, Morning Face (1968) won him the Sahitya Akademi Award. Like much of his later work, it contains elements of his spiritual journey as he struggles to attain a higher sense of self-awareness.

He died in Pune on 28 September 2004 at the age of 98.

Mulk Raj Anand, English literature, Indo- Anglian literature