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Mulk Raj Anand

Mulk Raj Anand (12 December 1905 – 28 September 2004) was an Indian writer in English,
notable for his depiction of the lives of the poorer castes in traditional Indian society. One of the
pioneers of Indo-Anglian fiction, he, together with R. K. Narayan, Ahmad Ali and Raja Rao, was
one of the first India-based writers in English to gain an international readership. Anand is
admired for his novels and short stories, which have acquired the status of being classic works of
modern Indian English literature, noted for their perceptive insight into the lives of the oppressed
and their analyses of impoverishment, exploitation and misfortune.[1][2] He is also notable for
being among the first writers to incorporate Punjabi and Hindustani idioms into English[3] and
was a recipient of the civilian honour of the Padma Bhushan.[4]

Early life and education

Born in Peshawar, Anand studied at Khalsa College, Amritsar, graduating with honours in 1924,
[3]
before moving to England, where he attended University College London as an undergraduate
and later Cambridge University, earning a PhD in Philosophy 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.

Career

Anand's literary career was launched by family tragedy, instigated by the rigidity of the caste
system. His first prose essay was a response to the suicide of an aunt, who had been
excommunicated by her family for sharing a meal with a Muslim woman.[5][6] His first main
novel, Untouchable, published in 1935, was a chilling expose 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 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 savior 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. The
introduction was written by his friend, E. M. Forster, whom he met while working on T. S.
Eliot's magazine Criterion.[7] Forster writes: "Avoiding rhetoric and circumlocution, it has gone
straight to the heart of its subject and purified it."

Inevitably, Anand, who in the 1930s and '40s spent half his time in London and half in India, [3]
was drawn to the Indian independence movement. During his time in London, he wrote
propaganda on behalf of the Indian cause alongside India's future Defence Minister V. K.
Krishna Menon, while trying to make a living as a novelist and journalist. [8] At the same time, he
also supported freedom elsewhere around the globe and even travelled to Spain to volunteer in
the Spanish Civil War, even though his role in the conflict was more journalistic than military.
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He spent World War II working as a scriptwriter for the BBC in London, where he became a
friend of George Orwell. Orwell penned a favourable review of Anand's 1942 novel The Sword
and the Sickle and remarked that "although Mr. Anand's novel would still be interesting on its
own merits if it had been written by an Englishman, it is impossible to read it without
remembering every few pages that is also a cultural curiosity," adding that the growth "of an
English-language Indian literature is a strange phenomenon".[9] He was also 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 essays on a wide range of subjects, as well as autobiographies, novels
and short stories. Prominent among his novels are The Village (1939), Across the Black Waters
(1939), 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 (IPO) on the issue of cultural self-
comprehension of nations. His contribution to the conference of the IPO in Innsbruck (Austria)
in 1974 had a special influence on debates that later became known under the phrase of
"Dialogue Among Civilizations". Anand also delivered a series of lectures on eminent Indians
including Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru and Rabindranath Tagore, commemorating their
achievements and significance and paying special attention to their distinct brands of humanism.

His 1953 novel The Private Life of an Indian Prince was more autobiographical in nature. In
1950 Anand embarked on a project to write a seven-part autobiography, beginning in 1951 with
Seven Summers. One part, Morning Face (1968), won him the Sahitya Akademi Award.[10] 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 of pneumonia in Pune on 28 September 2004 at the age of 98.[11]

Literary style

Anand, who was associated with Communism, used his novels to make broad attacks on various
elements of India's social structure and on British rule in India; they are considered important for
their social statement.[12]

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Coolie

Mulk Raj Anand was one of the triumvirates who inaugurated the new section of writers of
fiction along with R.K. Narayan and Raja Rao. Anand is a novelist of urgent social concerns and
preoccupations, and the social impulse is at the heart of his writings. He is considered the
Messiah of the downtrodden, the unwanted and the unloved. Even in a random reading of
Anand’s novels, the reader becomes immediately aware of such issues as the tyranny of the caste
system , its injustice, and its social, moral and economic consequences, class conflicts,
exploitation of various kinds of the poor by the rich, quest for identity, search for freedom, etc.
Under colonial rule, a number of social and economic changes took place and as a result a feudal
society was gradually transformed into a capitalistic one. The class system in India has turned
out to be a new kind of caste system. It is built on the cash nexus on which it thrives. It has
created a society much more complicated and devious, and in some respects more rigid than the
one created by caste. Therefore it has become a very powerful divisive force, far more damaging
to social cohesion than caste, as it has tended to segregate people into the rich and the poor, the
haves and the have - nots.

Coolie is one classic example of the story of the underprivileged class of the society and of the
oppressed people who cannot even make both ends meet. Its appeal is innate, humane potential
and wide extensive that has designed it purposive to be translated into more than 38 languages of
the world. It has earned for Anand a global reputation as one of the prolific and prominent
English novelists. The story is told from the eyes of the narrator and brings to light the inevitable
and hidden evils of the Raj, right from exploitation, caste ridden society, communal riots, and
police injustice. The novel takes us to different places and cities showing the inhuman and
degrading treatment that the poor Munoo gets at the hands of the socially, economically, and
politically affluent and higher classes of Indian society and how he copes with all circumstances
alone. Anand was able to strike a cord in the hearts of the conscientious Indians with the
beautiful and real to life portrayal of the down trodden masses of Indian society, the so called
have nots. Mulk Raj Anand was much appreciated and recognized for this novel and was one of
those people who were high ly influenced by Mahatma Gandhi. And this influence is clearly
seen in all his works including Coolie. True to his Marxist spirit, he always portrayed the real
India, and more specifically the poor India. Though the novel is historically located in 1930s, it
continues to enjoy the same contemporaneity in the present century India.

Munoo is the protagonist of this novel Coolie. Generally, the protagonists of the novels of Mulk
Raj Anand are from dirt and dust; they are too meek to report against the evil forces which tend
to suppress them and their like. These heroes -antiheroes, no doubt, are endowed with certain
admirable qualities of the head and the heart; but the cruel, irrational social forces hamper the
proper development of these qualities. The diligence, intelligence, and sensitiveness of these
characters are awfully suppressed that they can never gain confidence to wage a fight for their
cause. They, however, do sensitively feel the torture of the unjust practices, but the reaction is
limited merely to their acknowledgement of the social status which they are doomed to accept
without a hope for emancipation. The knowledge of their helplessness against the establishment,
social set-up, traditions, taboos and customs makes them writhe with acute mental agony. They
can do nothing but accept their faith.

The summary lines of Coolie delineate a bohemian life saga of an adolescent hill boy Munoo.
An idyllic life in the Kangra hill with friends and relations seemed to be short lived as Munoo’s
guardian and uncle Dayaram, at the instigation of his irate wife, drags the orphan to town to eke
out his living. The orphan boy Munoo runs to avoid every place of cruelty in search of happiness
and everywhere he is suppressed. He is aged fifteen and he does various jobs at Daulatpur,
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Bombay and Simla. He dies of tuberculosis in the end because of poverty. Munoo is exploited
greatly in one way or another, by one person or another. Munoo universally symbolizes the
suffering of the oppressed and those taken advantage of. Suppression takes major role in Coolie
to show how pathetic the lives of the Indian people are under the suppressive forces. Through his
saga of suppression, Anand shows the decline and upturn in the life of Munoo. Munoo’s uncle
and aunt consider him as a machine for obtaining money. Munoo willingly receives his role as a
slave and agrees to go to town with his uncle. At fourteen, Munoo is forced to work in the house
of Babu Nathoo Ram, a worker in Imperial Bank in Sham Nagar. Munoo’s romantic views are
destroyed by the wife of Babu Nathoo Ram. This lady is not good -natured and always abuses
and curses him without any reason. Anand’s Munoo is denied happiness. Munoo is humiliated
for relieving outside the wall and abuse is showered on him. Munoo suffers physical and mental
torture and this shows suppression in the form of child labour. Even at the tender age of fourteen,
he is not provided with the necessities.

Munoo is, in fact, a burning symbol of millions of unfortunate souls like himself –lost and
bereft, abused and down-trodden. If Anand hints at the gradual break-down of the caste system,
mainly through the British, in Untouchable and Road , he shows in Coolie how it is replaced by
class system –an evil no less vicious than the former –an awful result of social revolution
fermented by the twin forces of industrialism and the cash nexus. Central to Coolie is Anand’s
humanistic faith that this class-consciousness born of money or social status can have crushing
effects on those that are at the lower rungs. We can see in Coolie how the evils of poverty and
cruelty crush a bud of youth before it could bloom to any extent. Daya Ram, Mr. and Mrs.
Nathoo Ram, Ganpat, Chimta Sahib, and Mrs. Mainwaring too, have only contempt for Munoo.
They slap him, kick him, and abuse him. Almost at every turn he comes across only pain and
cruelty which make his life a painful saga of suffering. He is forced to become a sort of a
purposeless vagabond with apparently no control on his destiny.

By studying all the above characters, we can say the main character who is Munoo who suffer
because he is poor he is coolie and all other coolies also suffer because capitalists and other rich
Indians exploits them physically and economically. Munoo is the representative character in the
novel. His longing to live, we can see in the novel. Right from the beginning we can say whether
in village or at city, all persons who are responsible for the suffering of the character Munoo are
the same. Moneylender seized all property of Munoo's father and his mother. His father died of
shock and Munoo became orphan. He worked in textile factory. There also capitalists exploited
him. Anand depicted the real condition of downtrodden workers of the society. Anand also
shown how a lady exploits Munoo sexually and because of extra work of pulling rickshaw and
sexual exploitation, Munoo died. In Coolie Anand has shown extreme suffering of the characters
like Munoo, Hari-Har and Prabh Dayal.

Anand suggests that a little more sympathy and a little more tenderness on the part of the society
could have turned Munoo into a happy individual, and also averted his tragic end. There are
many writers in Indian Writing in English who have dealt with the theme of untouchability and
segregation. But nobody has been able even to come near Mulk Raj Anand. With his literary
power and perspectives he has tried his best to spring up the healthy human values and radical
social transformation in our human society in which the haves and have nots both can enjoy
happily the bliss of human life on the same footings and fraternity peace, love and justice.