Mulk Raj Anand - Views on Art

 

Mulk Raj Anand

Views on Art 

Mulk Raj Anand is one of India’s foremost novelists, and is among the most remarkable of contemporary fiction writers of the world. He has written, besides fiction, books and articles on varied subjects, such as art and painting, education, theatre, criticism, poetry, English language, Indian dishes, female beauty, Indian civilization, the story of man, the story of India, autobiography of ideas etc. Anand is a voracious reader of literature, art, philosophy etc. He admits that he has lived and written under the impact of countless writers, among whom the most important are Aristotle, Rousseau, Marx, Ruskin, Bertrand Russell, the Bloomsbury intellectuals, Locke, Iqbal, Gandhi, Buddha, the ancient Indian saints, the English Renaissance scholars, Tagore, Nehru, Bhai Vir Singh, Prem Chand, Sharat Chand Chatterji, Bankim Chand Chatterji, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Gorky, James Joyce, Fielding, Smollett, Dickens, Hardy, D.H. Lawrence, Freud, Adler, Jung, Einstein, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Victor Hugo, Goethe.

His books are read and admired the world over. His first novel, Untouchable, published in the early thirties, has been translated into twenty world languages and keeps its interest intact to this day. Professional and academic critics, both in India and abroad - Europe, America and Australia - have evaluated his works. He was awarded, though a bit late, the much-coveted Sahitya Akademi Award in 1972.

Mulk Raj Anand is not so much concerned with any formal philosophy as with men and women. He creates novels, not to expose his philosophy of humanism, but to portray human beings in their wholeness, with their interior as well as exterior life.

 

Views on Art

Art and Life

The relation between art and life is not as direct as the one between newspaper propaganda and life. Nevertheless, even the most detached and objective writer knows that there is a genuine and vital connection between art and life. While creating a work of art, the artist expresses the significant aspects of a given experience through images largely shaped by the desire in his mind. Thus “as an art work results from the reflection in the mind of the artist of all the aspects of his experience, it is fundamentally related to life, only improving on it, or rather intensifying it through the “creative myth”, so as to change life in the deeper centers of other people’s experience and thus present an integral vision of what life could be like”. The artist is able to penetrate the core of reality by presenting things from a fresh angle, and consequently he offers the most comprehensive vision of things. The greatness of the artist’s work is measured by the extent to which it confirms people’s vision and reflects their moods, emotions, passions, thoughts and desires. Such a work of art communicates a profound vision of life, and is really revolutionary. It aims at integrating man and society, and not at providing a formula for escape. According to Anand: ‘If this conception of the function of art in society approximates to the real needs of people in our time, then the artist is a revolutionary in the true sense. And as he can perceive reality at its highest, and disclose the way to a new life, the artist stands as an inspiring force behind all those men and women who face the tasks of reconstructing the future society out of the shambles of a near prehistoric present’.

 

Art for Life’s Sake

Discarding the dictum of ‘Art for Art’s sake’, Anand asserts that ‘Art is for life’s sake’, for the sake of man’s progress. Literature should be used as a means of alleviating the sufferings of fellow human beings. The creative artist is a realist who allows his vision to be shaped by the time, the place and the circumstances of the period to which he belongs. Thus, Anand is opposed to those who hold that art, though influenced by life, is essentially governed by its own inner logic, and not by outside forces. According to him, every writer is a committed artist, because the aim of art is to achieve integration, that is, ‘to effect connection’ between man and man, and between the individual and the world. He molds the values by which men must live. This does not mean that art should be mistaken for the pulpit. The artist should present his message in his creative work without distorting its artistic side. The creative writing is not merely a realistic depiction of life; but it is a manifestation of an impressionistic vision. Such a work makes man aware of his destiny as a social being. Anand says, ‘All art is propaganda. The art of Ajanta is propaganda for Buddhism. The art of Ellora is propaganda for Hinduism. The art of the Western novel is propaganda for humanity against the bourgeois. Gorky as a humanist dared to speak of man, man’s condition, not to say how awful it is, but he also suggested what man could be. And thus, he did propaganda for man’.

Anand believes that the work of a creative writer is always inspired by a mission: a powerful attack on the evils of life like hypocrisy, cruelty, insensitivity, etc. and an advocacy of love and compassion which make human life nobler and happier. The novel neither states a case, nor suggests practical solutions of certain problems, nor offers a direct exhortation. It mainly interprets the problems related to man’s destiny.

Anand averts that the novel is not the vehicle of presenting directly philosophy or moral preaching or the writer’s doctrinaire opinions. He attacks Raja Rao by saying that after Kanthapura he becomes an ‘anti-novel novelist’ because he deliberately uses philosophy as an essential part of the novel. His objection to The Serpent and the Rope is that moral reflections and philosophical ideas weigh heavy on the large portions of the novel. Raja Rao, according to him, uses the novel form to preach. Philosophy is inseparable from a great work of art; but it should be implicit in it, and not explicit. The writer should not insert his doctrinaire opinions in the novel.

Anand’s approach differs from that of D.H.Lawrence who does not see any wide gulf between the novel and philosophy. He opines that the novel should not be an exposition of some system of philosophy; rather it should portray the wisdom of the heart.

 

Distancing between the Art and the Artist

The author is subjective to a great extent, but he, according to Anand, should try his best to keep himself aloof from his work. He seems to believe that the writer should be present in his book like God in his created world, invisible yet omnipresent. The novelist should try to become the great god, who creates mankind, but is not determine their destiny. Distance is very important in art, because art, though like life, and reflecting it, is not life.

Anand says, as the painter corrects his perspective by moving away from the canvas and looking at his picture from a certain distance so the novelist tends to create a structure, a unity out of the contrary and discordant elements, by adopting the attitude of ‘God Almighty’ both creating the world and looking at his creation from afar.

The writer writes from the compulsion of one kind or the other, deeply related to himself. Anand illustrates it by giving the instance of his becoming a writer. He tells us that he “wrote from the compulsion of a morbid obsession with myself and the people who possessed me, deep in my conscience”. This compulsion is sometimes in the form of other kinds of wild and inchoate urges. In Anand’s own case, the other urges driving him to write were; the desire to get recognition; the search for philosophical insights founded on the lives of real people; and the urge to reveal the ugliness of death in life by portraying dramatically the universal non-human realities of life. But above all, the writer writes because he gets “a discrete pleasure from creating something”. Also, he wishes to get confirmation of the fact that other people feel and think like him. That is to say, he wishes to hear the reader say that he has felt or thought just like his such and such character. This compulsion of the writer whatever its form may be, becomes his original inspiration to write.

Anand says, that in the creative process both the body and soul are involved. As a matter of fact, the distinction between body and soul disappears, and the creative artist sees “that the body in soul and the soul body”. The creative activity does not mean simply the physical absorption of the author; it needs his complete involvement-the involvement of his conscious self as well as his unconscious. He feels ‘the magic of the quick’, which brings things out of the illuminations, working like some sort of secret electric button which switches on “a dim light, fed by some power-house of the unconscious”. Thereafter the creative activity passes through the process of the distillation of emotions carried out and controlled by the brain, thus bringing about some kind of co-ordination of the amorphous urges. It is only after this that the creative artist gets a kind of tranquility “as though one had had one’s best for the time being and thrown off the weight of centuries, hidden feelings of oppression, disgust and horror against insults, off one’s chest”.