Copyrights

Role and Achievement by Amrik Singh

National Book Trust, India, 2008
Paperback, Rs. 45.00


CONTENTS

Preface and Acknowledgements

The Advent
Untouchable and After
The War years
The Publication Of Marg
The Impact of Marg
The Middle Fiction
The Later Fiction
The Short Fiction
Anand’s Other Writings
The Achievement of Mulk Raj Anand

Work of Anand cited in the Book

Amrik Singh, the author of this volume got to know Mulk Raj Anand in 1938 and remained in touch with him all his life. During his long career, he has been a teacher, an educational administrator, an author of several books on educational policy, a playwright in Punjabi and also a human rights activist.

THREE ROLES OF MULK RAJ ANAND

Written by Amrik Singh, NBT has brought out a publication titled Mulk Raj Anand: Role and Achievement, under its National Biography Series. Herein we reproduce an excerpt from a chapter ‘The Achievement of Mulk Raj Anand’.

Anand led three paralleled careers. He started as a novelist and short story writer and laid the foundation for bringing out the innovative journal Marg. After three decades, he ceased to be its editor. But throughout his career, he continued to live up to the role of an Indian intellectual as he perceived for himself. Each aspect of these careers have been referred to and discussed in the previous chapters.

Those who are connected with creative writing do not know much, except in general terms, about what he accomplished as a critic of art; and those who admire his work as an art critic are not knowledgeable enough about his role and standing as a writer. In regard to his role as an Indian intellectual, no one is all that committed to it.

In brief, it is his first two roles- a creative writer and an art critic- to which most attention has to be given. As a novelist, he has received considerable attention as a pioneer in Indo-Anglian fiction. Apart from him, Raja Rao and R.K. Narayan were the two other known figures who constituted a kind of trinity and were looked up to with admiration. As far as Anand is concerned, he had written about Indian life with genuine passion and commitment. Most of his early novels focused upon the theme of exploitation and social justice. This role of his as a writer of novels has received as much attention as they deserved……

In 1973, M.K. Naik, one of his better known critics in the sphere of Indo-Anglian writing, brought out a book on Anand ….After having discussed his work, he concludes by saying:

….What Anand can do and has done is meaningful enough. In Spite of his doctrinaire convictions, he has, at his best, appreciated the finest aspects of both tradition and modernity. His humanitarian compassion which gives an unmistakable ring narrative; his Saeva indignatio against social wrongs, and his ruthless realism in exposing the exploitation of the bottom dogs of his work; the wealth of characters from different strata of Indian life in it; his significant experiments in form in novels like Untouchable and The Big Heart and stories like ‘The Lost Child’ his daring attempt to float ‘Pigeon Indian’ in the firmament of Indian Writing in English’ his narrative and descriptive talent and the lyricism that enlivens his prose, when occasion demands - all these stamp him as a major Indian novelist and short story writer in English, his many limitations notwithstanding…..

Naik had quite a few critical things to say about him. At one stage, he argued that the post-independent India should have provided an exciting artistic challenge to him, but somehow Anand failed to meet this challenge…. What went wrong? He pointedly asks:

Why was Anand’s art unable to develop new dimensions after Independence? An artist’s mind and development are a sphinx’s riddle and a critic can at best only hazard a guess (with due apologies). Did Anand find the social wrongs which formed the central subject of his fiction completely eradicated after Independence? Certainly not. An objective observer will have to concede that though a certain amount of the pre-Independence problems either still remain unsolved or have developed fresh ramifications (as Anand himself tried unsuccessfully to show in The Road).

No one can answer these questions. Anand himself told Naik that he planned to write something about Bangladesh. Apart from that meaningful theme, there was the whole drama of the partition of India which he had witnessed at first hand. He had not been involved in it personally except from a distance. He had decided to settle down in Bombay, and Lahore soon become a part of the days gone by. He did attempt to write something about the tribal attack on Kashmir. But the Novel which he wrote on this theme, The Death of a Hero, turned out to be unbelievably poor.

……The first one was that it was the impact of his childhood memories and the strong humanist outlook which he had developed and which led him to write the first two novels in the way he did so. Once that phase of his life was over, he gradually discovered a kind of emptiness within himself. The decision to come back to India soon after war provided him an accession to deal with this problem.

Secondly, the fact that he could arrange to bring out a journal of art criticism like Marg was the fulfillment of a dream which gave him the kind of opening that he had been waiting for………

…..A constructive way of looking at the whole issue would be to recognize the fact that whether there was an emotional or intellectual upheaval in his thinking or not, he developed a whole new career for himself as an art critic. Which of these two careers will eventually give him the kind of standing to which he is entitled remains to be seen.

Price: - 395/-

Anand”s most Profound study of human nature,Private Life of An Indian Prince, is the story of a man’s compelling love for woman. It is at the same time a historical novel of unusual power, showing the demise of the princely states with the birth of a free India. Maharaja Ashok Kumar of Sham Pur asserts complete independence for his small hill state rather than join the Indian Union. A febrile romantic, who has inherited more of the vices than the virtues of his ancestors, he is encouraged by his nymphomaniac mistress Ganga Dasi, a powerful and illiterate hill-woman whom he has installed in his palace to the exclusion of his three legitimate maharanis. To feed mistress’s greed, he exhorts large sums of money from his starving peasantry; this is enough to provoke a revolt in Sham Pur and incur the extreme displeasure of the Indian Government in Delhi.

His personal impulses and passions blind the Maharaja from the large social issues involved. He meets Ganga’s challenge with hysterical tears, and those of his people and the Government of India with melodramatic gestures and self-deluding lies. Needless to say he loses both contests. Exiled to London, he seduces a shop girl with all his former princely finesse. But he cannot forget his mistress and his love for her brings about his downfall.

Introduction to this book is by SAROS COWASJEE (Professor Emeritus of the University of Regina in Canada who has been following the writings of Mulk Raj Anand for over thirty years.

Testimonials:

‘As an interpreter of the East to the West, Mulk Raj Anand is among the most remarkable
of contemporary novelists.’
GLASSGOW HERALD

‘Mulk Raj Anand has woven history and fiction into an excellent novel.’
The AUCKLAND STAR

‘Private Life of an Indian Prince is a beautiful novel which can be read several times
with new vistas of meaning.’
CEYLON BROADCASTING CORPORATION (CBC)

It is eloquent, ironical, funny, and tragic. Indeed, it is one very fine novel which I cannot
Imagine anybody laying aside.’
GEOFFEREY HUTTON IN ARGUS (MELBOURNE)

‘The book presents a great historic story…in fine detail, searching out every grain of truth as it
goes.... It is claimed as the final and definitive work of Mulk Raj Anand….’
THE IRISH PRESS

‘…Anand paints with the utmost vividness… he writes as an artist.’
WALTER ALLEN

Price Rs.

Publisher:

Price Rs.2250/-, US$60

This volume of Marg is to honour Dr An ands stellar contribution to the arts and architecture as well as aesthetic and heritage issues of our country. Therefore this volume examines his role as the quintessential post-colonial intellectual who argued for a modern and humanist Indian nation. This volumes contributors knew Mulk well, as a senior contemporary and as a mentor. The essays by contributors namely Geeta Kapur, Ratan Parimoo, Gulammohammed Sheikh, Mustansir Dalvi, Charles Correa, Kavita Singh, Annapurna Garimella and Dolly Sahiar. They not only recall Dr Anands intellectual development and assess his path-breaking role in making Marg a forum for discussion of wide-ranging cultural issues, but also narrate how his rebellious but compassionate personality touched and transformed lives of individuals as well as cultural institutions and policies. Through this volume, Marg is honouring itself and acknowledging its existence by virtue of its having been founded by Mulk himself some sixty years way back in 1946 when he returned from UK and settled in Mumbai, then Bombay . The volume is a fortuitous blend of the intellectual and the emotional, much like Mulk Raj Anand himself.

Price Rs.260/-, US$12

It has two articles, Mulk and Modern Indian Architecture by Mustansir Dalvi and Mulk Raj Anand at 100 by Charles Correa

Price Rs.695/-

‘What is a writer if he is not the fiery voice of the people who…transmutes in art all feeling, all thought, all experiences, thus becoming the seer of a new vision in any situation Mulk Raj Anand

The Mulk Raj Anand Omnibus is a tribute to one of the founding fathers of the Indian novel in English. Mulk Raj Anand (1904-2004) is best known for the impassioned social critique contained in his writings. This special commemorative edition published on the eve of his hundredth birth anniversary brings together three of Anands finest novels which capture the ambivalence of a nation caught between tradition and modernity: Untouchable (1935), Coolie (1936) and Private Life of an Indian Prince (1953).

Untouchable remains a modern classic in its re-creation of one day in the life of Bakha, a sweeper boy. That he is an untouchable is portrayed as his ‘fate; there is no way out of his

appalling existence as an outcast in the system. The vitality and richness of the narrative make this one of the great literary portraits of all time. Coolie recounts the adventures of Munoo, a young boy forced to leave his village to fend for himself and discover a world of his own. As his journey takes him far from home, working as a servant, factory-worker and rickshaw driver, we see through the narrators eye many of the unspoken evils of the Raj – exploitation, police brutality, caste strife and communal riots

Private Life of an Indian Prince is the fascinating story of a prince who has inherited more of the vices than the virtues of his ancestors. Despite his many excesses, the Maharajah retains our sympathies to the very end. Even his nymphomaniac mistress Ganga calls for our understanding. Anands brilliant characterization makes this novel truly remarkable.

Price Rs.65/-

The novel depicts the character of Munoo, a young hill boy who is dragged into the plains in the false hope of going to work and seeing the world. Fate takes him from the clutches of a vindictive housewife, to a primitive pickle factory in a feudal city, and then to Bombay where he earns some peace while serving a vain Anglo-Indian woman.

With his comradeship and love, his irrepressible curiosity and zest for life, Munoo emerges as a most attractive character. Such is the might of the authors pen and the force of his pity.

Coolie offers a remarkable impression of the smells and colours of India – an aspect of Anands unique writing in which he remains unrivalled.

Price Rs.175/-

It exactly communicates the claustrophobic tension of men in the front line, the imminence of death, and the pervading sense of inevitability which is the source of Anands anger, and at the same time, is at the root of so much Indian fiction. We never lose awareness that this is an Indian novel…

Alastair Niven, British Literary Critic says, ‘An and makes a universal statement about the nature of war apart from the particular tragedy of the Indian sepoys in Flanders in 1914. His descriptions of brutality match in compassion and outrage, and perhaps also in poetic flair, those of Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, or David Jones.

Price Rs.200/-

In Little Plays of Mahatma Gandhi, Mulk Raj Anand, reveals the Mahatma, saint – politician, as an intimate human being, of the earth earthy, with his head raised to the sky. He is known to contain in himself multitude of contradictions. He converts a drunkard into sobriety. He allies himself with the thief who accuses Capitalist Ambalal Sarabhai of being a bigger thief. He exhorts peasants to whom he has preached non-violence, to answer back the police violently, if they molest their women. He agrees that he sleeps with two girls to resist temptation.

Always known for his originaity of approach to the novel form, An and shows in the Little Plays, the conversion of his hero, to concern with the human condition of creatures, who were once men and women, from the clever member of the elitist Bloomsbury Group, to empathy.

This novel is dramatic dialogues is the first part of work in progress of the big novel AND SO HE PLAYS HIS PART, in which the author is currently creating characters from the lower depths from his remembrances of things past.

Price Rs.175/-

As in the Little Plays, it is a departure from the conventional novel to create fiction-faction in the form of letters written by Krushna Chander Azad to the Mahatma.

Gandhi gave Azad a talisman when the would be convert to non-violence left Sabramati Ashram, on a pilgrimage of inner India: Recall the face of the poorest and most helpless man and ask yourself if the step you contemplate is going to be of any use to him.

Arriving in Bombay, in association with a modest scribe, D.C. Shah, an American disciple of the Mahatma, Mary Margret Fuller, and a Quaker Englishman Padre Michael Edward, the hero-anti-hero tries to rescue Laxmi, widow of Hari coolie, from a Pathan slum Dada, Lad Khan, who has taken her as his fourth wife. Azad and his colleagues fail. The woman commits suicide. And do gooding is thwarted in the hell in the sunshine, which the British Sarkar has made of India .

The convert finds himself breaking all vows he has taken in the Ashram.

In intimate letters, written daily as confessions of defeat, Mulk Raj

Anand characterises, among other colourful figures, philanthropist Jamnalal Bajaj, Communist Angre, and relentless M.A. Jinnah, who dismisses the Mahatma with: ‘Oh that Caliban Gandhi!

This novel, second part of the epic ‘And So He Plays His Part, in a series of spirited, intense episode, which breaks away from ‘He ‘She ‘It popular English love fiction, bringing back Krishna Chander Azad home from voluntary exile in the West.

Price Rs.100/-, US$ 8.99

Creates reactions of Krishan Chander Azad, to carvings of dramatic myths of Lord Shivas power, in complexes of caves, carried out according to myth gossip in eighth century A.D., under the shadow of giant rectangular shrine by Ellora village in middle India . Beyond the imposing Brahmanical Shrine, a century before, had been carved cave shrines in honour of Buddhist female saints, from initiatives of Buddhist abbot Saraha, who came from Nalanda Monastery and got patronage from benevolent middle Indian Raja, for scooping out shrines in honour of potential women Bodhisattvas. They were thus accepted by monks for worship of compassion and grace. Innovatively, the author evokes moods implicit in myths, dramatized in marvelous carvings, besides reflecting masterly skill of sculptors of middle period of Indian history in shrine of Ellora: so that, contemporary intelligentsia may inherit contrasting messages of Brahmanical myths of power and Buddhist-Jain contest of Pity.

price Rs. 110/-

1. The Tamarind tree
2. The Priest and the Pigeons
3. Lady Bountiful
4. The Hiccup
5. The Brothers
6. At What Price, My Brothers?
7. Anjali Hasta
8. The Man who was too honest for his job
9. Mother
10. Torrents of Wrath
11. The Silver Bangles

In Lajwanti, the author focuses on a womans predicament and struggle to find an identity for herself. Frustrated by a rigid pattern of social relationships, gender bias, religious bigotry and her own petty human foibles, her abject condition serves as a metaphor for sacrifice and servility which form thematic heart of these stories.

Anands picture is real, comprehensive, and subtle, and the shifts in moods, from farce to comedy, from pathos to tragedy, and from the realistic to the poetic, are remarkable. – V.S. Pritchett, British Literary Critic.

“With great deftness, Anand pictures India …” Books Abroad, USA

Man whose name did not appear in the Census and other stories

1. The Road
2. The Bridegroom
3. The two lady Rams

Price Rs. 110/-

1. The Prodigal son
2. The Thief
3. A village idyll
4. Birth
5. Little Flower
6. The Tractor and the corn goddess

“The volume is remarkable for the variety of its inspiration…”

- Manchester Guardian, UK ; “stories have the power to charm” Weekend Review; “indeed adept in the art of spinning a yarn”- Punjab Journal of English Studies, GND Univ.

Things have a way of working out and other stories

The Price of Bananas

Price Rs.110/-
1. A Village Wedding
2. The Gold Watch
3. Five Short Fables
4. A True Story
5. The Wounded Dove
6. Death of a Lady
7. The Story of an Anna
8. ‘Old Bapu
9. The Shadow of Death
10. The Power of Darkness

“Mulk Raj Anand writes about the Indians much as Chekhov writes about the Russians, or Sean OFaolain or Frank OConner writes about the Irish. At the same time his manner is quite his own…. Mr Anands writing has an attractive sensuous quality. He somehow charges his pages with heat, colour, scents (or smells). He has, most of all, the touch, the power that makes the writer great – he can give human weakness a dignity of its own.” – Elizabeth Bowen in Tatler

Price Rs.95/-

1. The Maharaja and the tortoise
2. On the Border
3. A Rumour
4. The Liar
5. The Cobbler and the Machine
6. A Promoter of Quarrels
7. Babu Bulaki Ram
8. The Informer

‘The volume is remarkable for the variety of its inspiration… The virtues of a humourous appreciation of lifes little ironies and a sympathetic understanding of its tragedies is conveyed with a truly poetic intensity. Manchester Guardian, UK.

Price Rs.120/-

The Eternal Why
The Conqueror
The Barbers Trade Union
Duty
A Confession
Lullaby
The Terrorist
The Interview
A Kashmir Idyll
Lottery
Mahadev and Parvati
Eagles and Pigeons

There runs a fine poetic streak
through his stories” – Alfred Peries in Life and Letters

Price Rs. 110/-

1. Appearance and Reality
2. Boots
3. Professor Cheeta
4.The Lady and the Pedlar

1. The Eternal Why
2. The Conqueror

The Story Lost Child was written in the early hours of a morning in a room in Cambridge , from persistent recall, in authors sub conscience, of a poem by Guru Nanak: “We are all children lost in the world fair.” The memory brought back the panic the author had felt when he was lost, at the age of six, in a fair in Kaleshwar village, on the banks of the river Beas in Kangra valley of the Punjab Himalayas. The story was sent to seven magazines, and all sent it back with the usual Editors rejection slip. At the end of 1935, the author finds in a Cross Road bookshop that Lost Child was the only story from India in the Great Short Stories of the World published by Odhams Press, Covent Gardens, London WCI, the story has since been filmed by the Films Division of the govt. of India.

Price Rs. 80/-

The Body-Soul Drama is a full-length yet compact study of all the major/and minor novels by Mulk Raj Anand. This is a study to examine Anands novels in the light of the protest aspect of literature. It is from this view point that the entire discussion has been divided into chapters like plot, characterization, style and technique. The introductory biographical chapter provides relevance to the subsequent ones in so far as it serves as the breeding ground of his protest philosophy. The last chapter sums up Anands position as a novelist of genuine protest literature. This element of protest has been mistaken for propaganda in his case. Although Anand well understand that the novel requires formal construction, his protest is chiefly against a beginning a middle and an end of the novels of eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In fact, he does not believe in plot but in a pattern which he found in Flaubert, Tolstoy and James Joyce. Probably the inner motives of their characters and their stream of cosciousness, shown through their actions in quick succession, form the plot of nearly all Anandian novels.

Price Rs. 260/- US$ 10.00

Contents:

1. The Heritage of Rootedness
2. The Indian Tradition of the Novel as a Social Act
3. The Early Indian English Novel and
4. The Era of Humanism
5. Anita Desai and After
6. The Rushdie Phenomenon and the
7. Indian English Novel Today
8. The Feminine Psyche and the Indian English Novel Now
9. Rootedness and Related Concerns

Tracing art as the language of the soul and discerning the aesthetics of compassion and its redemptive power as an ingredient of the Indic tradition of storytelling, Dr A.S. Dasan, author of this book, takes the reader along in tracking the Indian English novel today.

Price Rs.150/-

There are books on or about Anand. Nearly all these critical books have tried to establish him as a humanist and Marxist. But very little is said about his existentialist outlook in his short stories and novels.
Attempt , therefore, has been made in the proposed study to trace the elements of Existentialism in the short stories of Anand

Price Rs.250.00

The Lost Child, The Barbers Trade Union, Duty, The Liar, The Maharaja and the Tortoise, A Rumour, A Pair of Mustachios, The Cobbler and the Machine, A Confession, A Promoter of Quarrels, Lullaby, The Terrorist, A Kashmir Idyll, Lottery, Mahadev and Parvati, The Thief, Professor Cheeta, The Tractor and the Corn Goddess, The Man Whose Name Did Not Appear in the Census, A Village Idyll, The Hangmans Strike, The Signature, The Parrot in the Cage, The Man Who Loved Monkeys More Than Human Beings, Reflections on the Golden Bed, Things have a Way of Working Out, The Gold Watch, Old Bapu, The Tamarind Tree, Lajwanti, A Dogs Life, and Fear of Fear

This volume brings together some of the best and most memorable stories from Anands published collections, each of them illustrating a different mood and tone. In his half-humorous and half-ironic way, Anand draws our attention to the plight of the marginalized, the poor and the illiterate, and penetrates their innermost feelings and emotions. Straightforward, unpretentious and expertly crafted, these unforgettable vignettes of life in twentieth-century India are sure to haunt the reader long after the book has been put down.

Selected and edited with an introduction by Saros Cowasjee

Price Rs. 295.00

Reflections On A White Elephant is a new novel which shows militant Hundutva on the offensive against exalted faith of Sri Aurobindo, Mahant Kalidas , Cambridge educated descendant of the Head of Mahakali Temple, turns away from worship of Goddess Kali by murder of a goat every morning in the inherited Mahakali Temple . Local Hindutva roughs tried to take possession of Shrine, beating up Mahant Kalidass followers, in spite of police protection. While devout followers like widow Rani Pritam Kaur, are for Mahant Kalidass reformist new way of worship, away from murder of goat every day, Hindutva youths plot to make rare white elephant of the Mahant drunk, so that it runs amuck and kills innocent peasants. Disgrace of accusation that he has caused murder of villager makes liberal Mahant take his own life. A new pure Hindu Shrine comes up in Baradari in which worship of Goddess Saraswati is inaugurated, to exalt memory of the forward Mahant. Author suggests reaffirmation of Hinduism other than idolatry as way towards self-realisation.

DR. ATMA RAM, academician, educationist, administrator and writer, has taught English language and Literature and guided research in colleges and the English Department of Himachal Pradesh University, Shimla, for over three decades and served as Principal, Govt. College for ten years. He has to his credit over three dozen books, and 300 articles/papers. His major publications in English include: Women in Indian Short Stories; India: Fifty Years of Education; Education for the Poor; Education for Development; Woman as a Novelist: A Study of Jane Austen; Heroines in Jane Austen.