Anand

Mulk Raj Anand.

Born: Peshawar, Pakistan in 1905. Attended: Khalsa College, Amritsar. Completed higher studies in universities of Cambridge and London. Early 1930’s worked as a lecturer and broadcaster British Broadcasting Corporation. Also worked as a contributer to T.S Elliot’s literary journal Criterion. Friends: Herbert Read, George Orwell and Henry Miller. He drew inspiration from works of Maxim Gorky and James Joyce. By this time he was strongly motivated by the writings of Karl Marx and enrolled as a member of the Communist Party. He was sufficiently outraged by the Civil War in Spain and joined the fight for the republican cause. Later he divided his time between his literary career in England and with Gandhi in the fight for India’s independence. And after 945 he returned permanently to India. Infact, Gandhi was an enormous influence on Anand for the rest of his life and helped shape his social conscience and consequently his writing. In Anand’s writing one continually hears the rumblings of a suppressed voice - incessant and strong but muffled by the stifling quilt of tradition and convention. This is really the voice of the outsider - the minority of one. It strives to make itself heard above the din of conformity that has various manifestations – religion, caste-system, colonization and wealth – and in doing so produces a variety of speakers. These speakers generally occupy subordinate spaces in society but nevertheless feel burning within them the desire to lash out against the system that has coalesced to keep them in subordination. Anand gives a voice to these who have been denied the fundamental rights to human dignity and his novels become repositories of the darkest of passions ranging from anger to hatred. Yet refulgent beneath the reservoir of strangled feelings lays the innate goodness that Anand believes is present in his hero’s. Their capacity to do good to occupy a position of subservience through necessity and stillretain the humanity and...