Mulk
Raj Anand
A Literature of Protest
Anand’s fiction may be called “a literature of
protest” - which strikes hard at the roots of sectionalism, snobbery, contempt,
etc. His creative writings are saturated with the element of protest. His works
are a spontaneous expression of a protest against the shockingly sordid and
painful spectacle of human misery. Anand’s inherent sense of justice roused in
him, even when he was a child, a protest against God who for no reason singled
out his lovely innocent cousin Kaushalya to die. Later, the young novelist
could not compromise with “his father’s subservience to the British” and his
mother’s “faith in ritualistic observance, superstitions and gullibility”. It
was again this sense of justice that compelled him to raise his angry voice
against the suppression of freedom of thought and expression, religious
hypocrisy and social repression.
He
does not indulge in diatribe but makes a constructive protest. With a sense of
satisfaction, he recalls: I certainly felt, in the midst of my own poetry and
exile, the compulsion that it is better not to win applause by conforming to my
establishment, but to face the privileged order and to claim the right to
notice the existence of men like Bakha. And I was determined to take all the
punishment of all confrontation … I wanted to renounce those who have for
centuries included in the prison of the fourfold order the men whom they also
continually destroyed as their enemies by duty. I wanted to reveal how much men
had changed from what they originally were -the contrast being available in the
lesser way out, a living crucifixion, or prolonged suicide. I wanted to show
the vast death of my country before the limping life promised by one-legged
politics. I wished to abnegate the death, by slow degrees, as in a vast
concentration camp, the death through alienation, caused by the need of
everyone to earn a pittance from the flunkeys of the few white sahibs, the
death whose bleached bones were scattered across the landscape in various
attitudes of prostration before the tin gods and the clay gods and the brass
gods. I wanted to bring to light the ghosts of the “dead souls” murdered
without a rite by the Dharma bugs. I wanted to beckon all the phantoms, so that
they should haunt the dreams of the half-dead, and awaken them, may be, to the
lingering sparks of life ... I wanted to burn and shine like: “Tiger, tiger,
burning bright ….”
Anand
candidly wrote about the poor with whom he was most familiar. True, he immersed
himself “in the sub-world of the poor, the insulted and the injured, through
continuous pilgrimages to the villages, the small town and big town bastis of
our country”. He abhorred all sort of distinction of caste, creed, class,
status, the outworn and outdated traditions and conventions. Realizing the
importance of his role and responsibility at a turning point of India’s
history, he was determined to become “the fiery voice of the people, who,
through his own torments, urges and exaltations, by realizing the pains,
frustrations and aspirations of others, and by cultivating his incipient powers
of expression, transmutes in art all feelings, all thought, all experience … .”
Unlike his great predecessors like Tagore, Sarat Chandra and Munshi Prem Chand,
the champions of the humble and peasantry, Anand, with his characteristic doggedness
delved deep into the depth of human consciousness of the lowly, the squalor and
ugliness of human life, against a background of taboos-ridden society and its
callous laws.
Anand
had felt on his pulses the fate of the underdog and the underprivileged, who,
before him remained mostly unnoticed in Indian literature. Anand was much
pained to see the “life quick” in man, being crushed under the heavy weight of
man-made laws, the scheme of cruelty and exploitation, the decadent and
perverted orthodoxy that held India in its devilish grip. But it would not be
wise to put labels on Anand’s writings, as he is genuinely humane.
Incidentally, the proletariat in him had all the courage to protest against the
odds of the prevailing social order of his times. He very well knew that “This
struggle requires the courage to say the unmentionable things, the
unconventional truths, the recognition of our civilization.”
Like
Charles Dickens he is a true social protestor - the elements of which are
visible in his novels especially Untouchable and coolie, the two early
masterpieces which evidence his steep “journey away from Bloomsbury literary
consciousness to the non-literary worlds, whose denizens have always been
considered ‘vulgar’ and unfit for the respectable worlds”. In these two books,
he identifies himself with the despair, helplessness, agony and misery of his
protagonists like Bakha and Munoo whom he elevates to the status of heroes of
fiction from the darkest pits of poverty, squalor and degradation. Strikingly
sincere in his portrayal of truth about the intricacies of human existence, he
felt that “the novel should interpret the truth of life, from felt experience,
and not from books”. A committed humanist, he found fiction as the most
appropriate vehicle of his genuinely new ideas and realities. He writes: I felt
that, only through fiction, which is the transformation, through the
imagination, of the concrete life, in words, sounds and vibrations, one may
probe into the many layers of human consciousness in its various phases.
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