Mulk Raj Anand - Characters

 

Mulk Raj Anand

Characters 

For Anand, the novel begins with character. He draws his characters from the real men and women whom he happens to know in actual life. Some people haunt the writer and compel him, and he knows them fully well for a pretty long period. Thus, real people are the germ of the novel. Speaking of his beginning as a novelist, Anand states that he felt interested in some people and they forced him to put them down in novels. His first novel, Untouchable, was centered upon a sweeper boy, Bakha, whom he adored as a hero from his childhood “because he was physically like a god, played all the games superbly and could recite whole cantos from the epic poem ‘Heer Ranjha’ of Waris Shah ... .” He was obsessed with his tragedy which lay in the fact that this extraordinarily talented boy was always insulted by most of the people because of his low caste, and could never get a chance to go to school.

Throughout his literary career, Anand wrote about real people like Bakha, Munoo, Gangu, Lal Singh, Birpal Singh, Gauri and others whom he knew quite closely in his early life. He reincarnates them repeatedly in his writings, not photographically but artistically and imaginatively. Of his fictional characters modeled after the people with whom he chanced to live at one or the other stage of his life, Anand writes in his special Preface to the second Indian edition of Two Leaves and a Bud (1951):

All these heroes, as the other men and women who had emerged in my novels and short stories, were dear to me, because they were the reflections of the real people I had known during my childhood and youth. And I was only repaying the debt of gratitude I owed them for much of the inspiration they had given me to mature into manhood, when I began to interpret their lives in my writing. They were not mere phantoms…. They were flesh of my flesh and blood of my blood, and obsessed me in the way in which certain human beings obsess an artist’s soul. And I was doing no more than what a writer does when he seeks to interpret the truth from the realities of his life.

Since art is not the literal transcript of life, these characters, taken directly from life, are considerably transformed by the author’s creative imagination, and thus become strikingly original and unique. Anand confesses: “the characters taken from my intimate experience, but are transformed creatively from within -often a lamb becomes a lion and a dove becomes jackal. I rely on my subconscious life a good in my creative work, and allow my fantasy to play havoc with facts”. Indeed, Anand puts a lot of his dream elements into his characters, thus making them strange creatures. The more and more he thinks and writes about them, the more and more complicated and rare human beings they grow. About his creation of Bakha, he writes: “… I kept on dreaming about several strains in the central character of Bakha, almost as though I was molding his personality and transmuting it from actuality into the hero of a nightmare”.

Anand feels that the writer should have an inner desire to depict the beauty, tenderness, terror, etc. in the lives of his characters. In addition, he should become one with his people in order to make them living and interesting. Describing his own process of creating characters, Anand says: ‘I had to go through their sufferings and little joys as my own. I had to become weak with their weaknesses. I had become strong with the strength of their resilience.

Anand thinks that the novelist should depict man in his essential nature -his primeval innocence and his desire to attain a higher consciousness. He himself has always striven to achieve this ideal of character-creation in his fiction. Characters in the novel should be given maximum freedom to express themselves so as to make the book both a convincing picture of life and artistically satisfying. But to achieve it, the novelist has to annihilate his personality. By keeping himself aloof from his book, he is also able to avoid sentimentality which damages a work of art irreparably. Anand says in this connection:

I must admit that the struggle to extirpate the novelist’s own personality and ideas, in order to give scope for the character to express himself, was very hard.

Anand thinks that the writer should in no case sacrifice the ‘quick’ of his own passion for the central character. While writing his masterpiece, Untouchable, he did not eliminate the ‘quick’ of his own passion for Bakha and did not adopt “a formalist empty shell approach” to the work, for it is the writer’s warmth for his character that endears him to the reader. Anand declares that he has not put his intellectual ideas into Bakha, but has certainly maintained his warmth towards him.

When given full freedom to think, feel and act according to his own psychology, a character sometimes goes beyond the control of the author, and runs away with the narrative. Anand is fully aware of this fact. While commenting briefly on his novel, Private Life of an Indian Prince, he remarks:

Most writers know how a character in a novel; sometimes takes control and runs away with the story. The author has been content to allow Dr. Shankar to take possession of the narrative, as well as become Sancho Panza to the Prince’s Don Quizote.

Anand believes that “even the so-called lowest dregs of humanity, living in utmost poverty, squalor and degradation, could become heroes of fiction”. This is the reason why he makes sweepers, coolies and the lowly like Bakha, Munoo, Gangu, Gauri, Lalu and others as the central figures of some of his best-known books. To Anand, the modern writer, living in a highly complex world, is concerned with multi-dimensional characters. Quite often he is obsessed by characters who, by their actions and words, unfold their inner life, and reveal the tensions which cause disharmony and discord in life. The author should emphasize the harmonies resulting from the discords of these people. Besides, he should deal with characters who are dangerous and are able to get rid of their subjective despair. They are capable of facing those who may destroy them. They should be portrayed as having conflicts in their hearts and minds like the people we see around us. They should be depicted with all the unreasonableness of the human heart and temperament emanating from the unconscious.