____________________________________________________________________

CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTION

___________________________________________________________________

6 
 
whole. The fact that Indian literatures are a product of a multilingual,

multicultural and socio-historical mélange cannot be overlooked. Today

Indian literature reached at the apex of creation with the contribution of

regional and national writers.

This researcher would like to focus on the root and brief literary

history of Indian writing in English and the genre – novel in Indo-Anglian

literature up to the time of Mulk Raj Anand for better understanding of

his novel. Here, it is essential to mention the brief history of Indian

writing in English and the contributors of it. Along with the list of the

contributors in Indian writing in English, the rise of the new form of

literature- novel in India is also necessary to focus. For that researcher

would like to divide the history of Indian writing in English into three

parts, first to understand the beginning and exploration of Indian writing

in English by major contributors, second for the rise and development of

new literary genre (novel) in Indo-Anglian literature and third to

understand Anand as a novelist. These three parts are foundation of my

research work. On the basis of the understanding of the Indo-Anglian

literature and the rise and development of novel in Indo-Anglian

literature, the major novels of Mulk Raj Anand can be judged properly.

Indo-Anglian literature contributed to the common pool of world

writing in English. It is a literature which is a combination of Indian

8 
 
literature and Indian literature written in English. Indian English

Literature refers to the body of work by writers in India who write in the

English and whose native or co-native language could be one of the

numerous languages of India. It is also associated with the works of

members of the Indian Diaspora. It is frequently referred to as Indo-

Anglian literature. As a category, this production comes under the

broader realm of postcolonial literature- the production from previously

colonized countries such as India. Indian English literature has a

relatively recent history; it is only one and a half centuries old. The first

book written by an Indian in English was by Sake Dean Mahomet, titled

Travels of Dean Mahomet; Mahomet's travel narrative was published in

1793 in England. In its early stages it was influenced by the Western art

form of the novel. Early Indian writers used English unadulterated by

Indian words to convey an experience which was essentially Indian.

Indian writings in English are a product of the historical encounter

between the two cultures—Indian and the western—for about one

hundred and ninety years. It isn’t that Indian people didn’t experience

the impact of a foreign culture. It did during the reigns of various foreign

rulers. But the difference with the British rule lies in the nature of the

economic system that had come into being in Europe after the

Renaissance, described by Marx as capitalist system. Before the

9 
 
introduction of the British rule India had the feudal economic system, in

accordance with which the vast population of the country, having

various religious faiths and conforming to the caste system, tried to live

their life, sometimes fatalistically and sometimes stoically. Above all, it

was a closed society with a peculiar cultural racial intolerance. In fact,

India had been awaiting a political and cultural change, which became

necessary after the weakening and disintegration of the Mogul Empire.

British rule in India, first of all, resulted in breaking the barrier of that

closed society. Then the greatest cultural impact came with the

establishment of four universities and with the introduction of western

educational system. The English language provided the natives with a

way to the western literature and to the western culture, of course.

English education created a class of native bourgeoisie, the majority of

which turned to their mother tongue while giving birth to a native

literature, applying the western aesthetic norms. But a few among them

thought it appropriate to give expressions to their feelings and

experiences in English. Thus, the peculiar body of Indo-Anglian

literature was created—while its contents were to be Indian, its medium

of expression was English.

If we take a backward glance at the beginnings of Indo-Anglian

literature, the stalwart figure of Raja Rammohan Roy appears first. The

10 
 
renaissance in modern Indian literature begins with Raja Rammohan

Roy. He had earned good command over English language by working

with British officials. He had tried to give new thoughts, removed old

dogma and typical rituals through Bramhosamaj.

The Bramhosamaj encourages establishing harmony between

men’s accepted faith and their practical observations. Rammohan Roy

worked for the betterment of women, freedom of press, English

education, social justice and plight of Indian peasantry. He had good

command over the English language and wrote prose and poetry in it.

For his contribution in the pool of Indian writing in English, K.R.Srinivasa

Iyengar writes;

Rammohan Roy although he could be named

as the first of the Indian masters of English

prose, was great in so fields that be belong to

Indian history more than to mere Indo-Anglian

literary history.1

In this way he had contributed his writing and thoughts in the

foundation of Indo-Anglian literature and prepared pathway for his

successors and contemporaries like Henry Derozio, the Cavally

Brothers, Kashiproshad Ghose, Hasan Ali, P. Rajagopual, Mohanlal,

11 
 
and Michel Madhusudan Dutt etc are considered first Indo-Anglian

writers of verse and prose.

The mid nineteenth century is the renaissance in India as that

was the time of great literary and social revolutions. At that time

legendary thinkers like Maharshi Debendranath Tagore, Kesub Chunder

Sen, Dayanand Saraswati, the founder of the Arya Samaj have

contributed for social reform, educational reform and religious reform

which has given scope for renaissance in India.

The first Indian English poet, Henry Louis Vivian Derozio (1809-

1831) had nurtured English verse in India. He became a teacher of

English literature at the Hindu College, Calcutta. A teacher as well as a

poet, Derozio had expressed nature in his poetry like Keats. The flavor

of Romanticism found in his poetry as he was highly influenced by

Byron, Shelley, Keats, Scott and Moore. He died at the very early age

due to cholera in 1831.

This was the time when Hindu society in Bengal was undergoing

considerable turmoil. In 1828, Raja Ram Mohan Roy established the

Brahmo Samaj, which kept Hindu ideals but denied idolatry. This

resulted in a backlash within orthodox Hindu society. It is in the

perspective of these changes that Derozio was appointed at Hindu

12 
 
college, where he helped release the ideas for social change already in

the air. His brilliant lectures presented closely-reasoned arguments

based on his wide reading. He encouraged students to read Thomas

Paine's Rights of Man and other free-thinking texts. Although Derozio

himself was an atheist and had renounced Christianity, he encouraged

questioning the orthodox Hindu customs and conventions on the basis

of Judeo-Christian rationalism. He infused in his students the spirit of

free expression, the yearning for knowledge and a passion to live up to

their identity, while questioning irrational religious and cultural practices.

Derozio's intense zeal for teaching and his interactions with

students created a sensation at Hindu College. His students came to be

known as Derozians. He organised debates where ideas and social

norms were freely debated. In 1828, he motivated them to form a

literary and debating club called the Academic Association. In 1830, this

club brought out a magazine named Parthenon. Apart from articles

criticizing Hindu practices, the students wrote on women's emancipation

and criticized many aspects of British rule. He also encouraged

students into journalism, to spread these ideas into a society eager for

change. He took great pleasure in his interactions with students, writing

about them: ‘Expanding like the petals of young flowers I watch the

gentle opening of your minds…’

13 
 
 Kashiprosad Ghose (1809-1837) is also counted as one of the

founder pillars of indo-Anglian literature. His contribution in Indian

English literature is as equal as Henry Derozio. His The Shair and Other

Poems (1830), finds a place in literary history of India. Even he is

considered as the first Indian to publish a regular volume of English

verse. Ghose edited an English weekly The Hindu Intelligence. His

poetry is counted as moralizing as good texture of originality and

conventional descriptions.

Michael Madhusudan Dutta (1824-1873), began writing while he

was at Hindu College. He won several scholarships in college exams

as well as a gold medal for an essay on women's education. While a

student at Hindu College, his poems in Bengali and English were

published in Jnananvesan, Bengal Spectator, Literary Gleamer,

Calcutta Library Gazette, Literary Blossom and Comet. Lord Byron was

Madhusudan's inspiration.

Michael’s exceptionally colourful personality and his

unconventional, dramatic and in many ways tragic life have added to

the magnetism and glamour of his name. Generous in friendship,

romantic and passionate by temperament, he was fond of the good life.

By dint of his genius, he removed the stagnation in Bengali literature

both in style and content. He was the first to use blank verse in 1860 in

14 
 
the play Padmavati based on a Greek myth. His later poems silenced

the critics and detractors, and permanently established the vogue of

blank verse literature.

Madhusudan’s epic poem: Meghnad-Badh Kavya is considered

as his all-time masterpiece till today. Written in blank verse, this epic

was based on the Ramayana but inspired by Milton's Paradise Lost.

Madhusudan transformed the villainous Ravana into a Hero. This grand

heroic-tragic epic was written in nine cantos which is quite unique in the

history of Bengali Poetry. Meghnad-Badh Kavya was Bengali literature's

first original epic and gave Madhusudan the status of an Epic Poet.

Much of his time abroad, especially in Versailles, was spent in

abject poverty, as the money from his late father’s estate on which he

was relying did not come regularly. His Indian friends who had inspired

him to cross the ocean had by now managed to forget the beggar

Madhusudan altogether. He fell hopelessly into debts and appealed for

help to the great personality, the scholar, social reformer, and activist

Ishwarchandra Vidyasagar (this kind soul was known to all as Daya

Sagar – the ocean of kindness, for his immense generosity).

His extravagant life-style, fickleness in money matters, and

reckless drinking to drown problems conspired to wreck his health and

15 
 
happiness, and likewise the health and happiness of his second partner

Henrietta, who had also succumbed to alcoholism during her days of

poverty in Versailles.

He was a man of real, though somewhat erratic, genius, and a

courageous innovator of forms and types which altered the whole

course of Bengali literature and added new dimensions to it. To his

adventurous spirit, Bengali Literature owes its first blank verse and the

sonnet, its first modern comedy and tragedy, and its first epic.

Dutt was particularly inspired by both the life and work of the

English Romantic poet Lord Byron. The life of Dutt closely parallels to

the life of Lord Byron in many respects. Like Byron, Dutt was a spirited

bohemian and like Byron, Dutt was a Romantic, albeit being born on the

other side of the world, and as a recipient subject of the British

imperialist enterprise. Madhusudan was a gifted linguist and polyglot.

Besides Indian languages like Bengali, Sanskrit and Tamil, he was well

versed in classical languages like Greek and Latin. He also had a fluent

understanding of modern European languages like Italian and French

and could read and write the last two with perfect grace and ease.

Bengal was epicenter for renaissance as it has given literary

scholars who gave fame to mother India at globe. Among them, Toru

16 
 
Dutt is the first poetess in Indo-Anglian literature. She had English

education and had a rich and respectable ancestry. Her family was rich

and highly educated. Her father Govind Chunder Dutt was a good

linguist and a civilized man with literary eye. The Dutt family moved to

Cambridge in 1871 where she had attended lectures. In 1875, she had

translated French writing in to English with the title A Sheaf Gleamed in

French Fields. She had learned Sanskrit and translated Ramayana,

Mahabharata and Sakuntala into English verse. She had attained

command over Sanskrit language and transformed her interest from

French to Sanskrit and translated so many Indian mythological works

into English.

Another contributor of literature from Bengal, as is the land of

arts, is Romesh Chunder Dutt (1848-1909). He was Toru Dutt’s cousin

and forwarded her writing at height. He had passed Indian civil service

Examination in 1869 and served at various capacities in India. He had

also devoted much time for literary creation in Bengali and English.

Romesh Dutt had written novels in Bengali and translated two of these

novels in to English named – The Lack of palms (1902) and The Slave

Girl of Agra (1909). He had narrated historical surveys in a large range

like – A History of Civilization in Ancient India, later Hindu Civilization,

India in the Victorian Age, The Economic History of British India and A

17 
 
brief History of Ancient and Modern Bengal. Apart from this, his greatest

achievement was the Bengali translation of Rig Veda. His translation in

to English verse from Ramayana, Mahabharata, Rig Veda, The

Upanishads, Buddhist literatures, Kalidasa’s Kumarasambhava and

Bharavi’s Kiratarjuniya – is most creditable contribution. Iyengar writes

the turn from Toru Dutt to Romesh Chunder Dutt as;

To turn from Aru and Taru Dutt to Romsh

Chunder Dutt is like passing from the bud and

the flower to the ripened fruit; from Erato and

Melpomene to Clio and Calliope; from Ushas,

rosy- fingered and short-lived, to the toiling Sun

on the ascendant; from infinite promise to

impressive achievement.2

Another sparkling star of Indian literature is Manmohan Ghose

(1869- 1924). He was an elder brother of Sri Aurobindo. He had English

education at Manchester and Oxford. His first poem collection –

Primavera (1890) was appreciated by literary scholars and classmate at

Oxford. Like Derizio, Manmohan Ghose became professor of English at

the Presidency College, Calcutta. In 1898, he published collection of

poems – Love Songs and Elegies and also wrote five act play- Perseus

the Deliverer. His wonderful sense of the beauty of English words and

18 
 
rhythm made him notable literary craftsman in eyes of English scholars

of England. His poetry was considered much intellectual thoughts and

rhythm in his poetry is outstanding feature. Manmohan Ghose was

born in 1869, the second son of an illustrious surgeon, Dr. K. D. Ghose.

Together with his brothers, Binoy Bhushan and Aurobindo, he studied at

Loreto Convent, Darjeeling. In 1879 Manmohan Ghose went to England

where he remained until 1894, completing a professional qualification of

Bar-at-law at Lincoln’s Inn. On his return to India, he joined Patna

College as professor of English; later on, he was appointed professor at

Presidency College, Kolkata and worked as Inspector of schools.

Manmohan Ghose began writing poetry when he was in England

and some of his poems were published in Primavera, an anthology

which also contained poems by Laurence Binyon, Arthur Cripps and

Stephen Phillips. Oscar Wilde, reviewing the volume, wrote of

Manmohan Ghose: “The temper of Keats and the moods of Matthew

Arnold have influenced Mr. Ghose, and what better influences could a

beginner have?”

Manmohan Ghose’s poetry in many ways broke with the earlier

school of Orientalist poetry. His poems often spoke of a longing to

return to England, where he had spent twenty two years of his life.

While his contemporaries in India, including his brother Aurobindo

19 
 
Ghose, were writing on nationalistic themes and were drawing upon

ancient Indian culture, Manmohan Ghose turned to England for

inspiration.

Up to this time, Indian literature had flourished in its fullness but it

was Rabindranath Tagore who lifted Indian literature at world level and

gained for modern India a place on the world literary history that won

Noble Prize for literature and gave recognition to India on global scale.

Rabindranath Tagore (1861- 1941) the versatile personality of Indian

literary scholar is considered as – the Rishi, the Gurudev and the

Maharshi. He was a poet, dramatist, actor, producer, musician, painter,

an educationist, reformer, philosopher, prophet, novelist, story writer,

and a critic of life and literature.

Rabindranath Tagore wrote primarily in Bengali and translated

many of his poems and plays into English. Before he was eighteen, he

had written more than 7000 lines of verse. For Gitanjali (1912) he won

the noble prize for literature and became poet of the world. After that his

other works and Gitanjali were translated by literary scholars into major

languages of world. To his credit, there is a long list of poems and

plays, both in Bengali and English which had made his place among the

world’s greatest writers. In Iyengar’s words;

20 
 
 As the years passed, he became more and

more a legendary figure; in his flowing bead

and immaculate white robes he was truly in the

line of the great Rishi of Upnishadic times, and

indeed he was truly in the line of the great

bearing witness to the triune Reality, seeing the

way showing it to others.3

The fertile soil of Bengal has given a shining star to the world in

the form of Sri Aurobindo Ghose. He (1872-1950) is the one

uncontestable outstanding figure in Indo-Anglian literature. He had

contributed very much to Indian literature and also uplifted his works at

globe.

Sri Aurobindo’s long poetic career has given him the height

of literary master of Indo-Anglian literature. He was interested in

teaching, poetry and politics. His Songs to Myrtilla and longer poems of

the early period- Urvasie were published in 1895 and 1896 respectively.

He was scholar of classics and used Miltonic diction and epic similes in

his works. This classical layer found in “Love and Death” – a poem of

about 1100 lines of blank verse and its central theme is love which is

based on an ancient Hindu legend with a remarkable resemblance to

21 
 
the Greek legend of Orpheus and Eurydice. Besides so many volumes

of his poetry and plays, Sri Aurobindo has written – The Life and Divine

– a work of prose art which is considered as the greatest philosophical

religious book.

The most outstanding work of Indo-Anglian literature is

Aurobindo’s Savitri which is in three parts, divided in to 12 books or 49

cantos which have total 23813 lines, on which the poet worked for fifty

years of his life. M.K.Naik observes in A History of Indian English

Literature that;

Savitri was continuously revised by the poet

almost till the end of his days and shaped into

an epic of humanity and divinity, of death and

the life divine. A sort of poetic philosophy of the

spirit and of life, and an experiment in mystic

poetry cast in to a symbolic figure.4

To conclude in brief about Savitri, Iyengar has used the words of

Prof. Raymond Frank Piper;

22 
 
 Aurobindo created what is probably the

greatest epic in the English Language. I

venture the judgment that it is the most

comprehensive, Integrated, beautiful and

perfect cosmic poem ever composed. It ranges

symbolically from a primordial cosmic void,

through earth’s darkness and struggles, to the

highest realms of super mental existence, and

illumines every important concern of man,

through verse of unparalleled massiveness,

magnificence, and metaphorical brilliance.

Savitri is perhaps the most powerful artistic

work in the world for expanding man’s mind

towards the Absolute.5

In the list of the path makers for Indo-Anglian literature, Sarojini

Naidu (1879 – 1949) was the first female contributor who served Indo-

Anglian literature for her life time. She studied at London and

Cambridge where she had developed the lyrical art. She was

multifaceted personality and more than a poet as she had occupied

some of the highest official positions in the public life of India.

23 
 
 Her first volume of poetry The Golden Threshold (1905) was

followed by The Bird of Time (1912) and The Broken Wing (1917) made

her greatest poetess of the age. Her lyrics have a perfect structure and

an exquisite finish and she handles various meters and stanza forms in

her poem perfectly. M.K.Naik observes;

Her best poetry is not just a faded eco of the

feeble voice of decadent romanticism, but an

authentic Indian English lyric utterance

exquisitely tuned to the composite Indian ethos,

bringing home to the unbiased reader all the

opulence, pageantry and charm of traditional

Indian life, and the splendors of the Indian

scene.6

In India, she recognized as the Nightingale of Indian song. She

became one of the foremost political figures as she was president of the

Indian National Congress and her oratorical mastery gave her fame of

national leader. She was a combination of a poet and a politician.

At that time, there was nationalistic movement in India.

Political and social scenario was different. The winds of change were

blowing steadily across the nation. Even the world wars had given new

24 
 
directions to India and movement for freedom was raised from every

corner of India under the heaviest influence of Mahatma Gandhi, who

provided powerful current of fresh air that made upset to all established

political strategies and ushering in several spheres to the core. The

importance of Gandhi in Indo-Anglian literature is outstanding as he has

prepared a new generation of literature which later came to recognized

as Gandhian literature. Mahatma Gandhi himself was no writer nor he

was so keen in the art of writing but he had influenced much to people

of the nation and at globe also. The period between the two world wars

and comprising them both was the Gandhian Age in India. He has

touched every segment of our national life – political, economical,

educational, religious, social life and the language and literature.

Gandhi has influenced our languages and literatures both directly and

indirectly.

The period of thirty years of the Gandhian age was brought

the revolutionary changes not only in the political scene but in all walks

of Indian life. In the social sphere, the Gandhian movement led to

removal untouchability, awakening among women, religious reform

movements, awakening among the depressed classes etc. which has

greatly influenced Indian English literature. His greatness is the

greatness of an ordinary man who through a long process of trial and

25 
 
error, aspiration and endeavor achieved a greatness indubitably his

own. His autobiography- Experiments with Truth (1925) which describes

the unfolding process is one of the imperishable classics of Indian

literature. His writings can divide in to three periods (1) The brief early

London period (1888-1891) (2) The South African period (1893-1915)

(3) The thirty three years of the Indian period (1915-1948). During the

first period, he wrote Guide to London which is an essay in 55 pages

based on his own experiences in London. During the second period, he

wrote pamphlets ‘An Appeal to Every Briton in South Africa’ (1896),

‘The Indian Franchise’ (1895) and ‘Grievances of the British Indians in

South Africa’ (1896). He launched journal – Indian Opinion where his

first major work ‘Hind Swaraj’ appeared in its columns in 1909. During

the third period of his writing, he started two well known journals- Young

India (1919-1932) and Harijan (1933-1948) in which all his major

writings henceforth appeared. Among the writings of Gandhi, his

autobiography My Experiments with Truth is the most outstanding work.

It is the detailed account of his personal life expressed with the

frankness and honesty which became human document.

Mahatma Gandhi’s writing covers social, political, cultural,

ethical and spiritual issues. His writing has profound frankness which

has attracted millions of readers and established itself as Gandhian

26 
 
literature. Even the writings of the followers of Gandhian philosophy are

known as Gandhian literature. The time period of almost three decades

enriched Indo-Anglian literature the most.

Jawaharlal Nehru (1889-1964) is the most remarkable name in

the history of India as well as in the history of Indo-Anglian literature. He

was the true heir of Gandhi in politics and one in the greatest leaders of

independent India. He played an important role for the development of

India as he remained Prime Minister of India for seventeen years. Nehru

was educated at Harrow and Cambridge. His first meeting with

Mahatma Gandhi in 1916 brought him very close to him. In the national

movement his real talent of leadership came out through his speeches.

He was great orator and a prolific writer. His father Motilal Nehru and

Rabindranath Tagore influenced him a lot. Even Carl Marx and Lenin

attracted Nehru very much. His first book-Soviet Russia (1928) is the

collection of articles where Nehru views Russia as India’s well wisher

and strong supporter for the development. His first collection of letters

published as-Letters from a Father to His Daughter (1930) consists of

thirty one letters written by him to his daughter Indira Gandhi. His most

remarkable work-Glimpses of World History (1934) is written between

October 1930 and august 1933 comprising the 196 letters written by

Nehru from prison. This book is survey of world history from the

27 
 
beginning of civilization to mid nineteenth Century. An Autobiography

(1936) is literary achievement of Nehru as writer. It was written in

continuous spell of about nine months is a literary expression of a man

at the height of his power. It is a presentation of different aspects of his

life. His narration includes and reveals his scientific outlook, his belief of

religion, his praise for Marxism and his fervent nationalism. It is also

living record of moments of Indian History for well over a generation,

present era and strong sense of history. In the words of M.K. Naik;

Nevertheless, by virtue of its sincerity and

vividness and its manifest historical and literary

importance, the work indubitably ranks among

the major autobiographies in world literature.7

Nehru always wanted to explore the great inheritance of India and

for that he wrote The Discovery of India (1946). This historical survey of

India from the Indus Valley Civilization to the mid nineteenth century is

considered as milestone in literary history and history of India where he

stood at greatest height of literary and political orb of India. Up to the

time of Jawaharlal Nehru, the Indo-Anglian literature flourished and

spread its beauty at the world. It is also important to mention that the

literary genre-prose and poetry flourished at its height in India but novel-

28 
 
a new literary genre yet to rise in the land of India by the master

novelists.

II

The researcher would like to explore the rise of novel in India and

the founder fathers of novel where it ripen in the hands of “ Three Big “

– Mulk Raj Anand, R.K. Narayan and Raja Rao. It is very much clear

that novel form of literature was new for India but it has been easily

accepted by Indian writers in English as well as by writers of regional

languages.

The fact that Indian literatures are a product of a multilingual,

multicultural, and socio–historical mélange cannot be overlooked.

Therefore, the study of various literatures elsewhere in the world and

comparative study of various regional literatures in India is not quite the

same thing. The Indian author has a rich heritage of ancient literature

preserved against many odds. He is not only emotionally committed to

this heritage, but it has also become an obsession with him, guarding

him consciously or unconsciously from western influence. In case of

Indian literature, it can be said that it presents one thought written in

many languages.

29 
 
 Though it is not possible to overlook the criticism voiced by

a few critics who do not wholly agree to the concept of a common family

of Indian languages or common culture necessarily determining the

singleness or unity of literatures in India, serious thought is given to the

essential oneness underlying all Indian literatures. One might say that in

India there are many languages but one literature. And, efforts are

already being made to devise programs to make a profound study of

Indian literature. The works in different Indian languages require

comparing with each other in order to understand the entire gamut of

Indian literature. In fact, the multi-lingual Indian literature has common

social, cultural, and political background and that is what, impresses

upon the need for study of literature in India.

What is more interesting for a student of Indian literature is

that there is a considerably large corpus of Indian literary works

available in English translation. Therefore, there is no compulsion to

learn a particular regional language to study the literature written in it. A

great body of literary works has been translated from various Indian

languages – whether ancient or modern. Eminent scholars in the field

are of the opinion that the whole corpus of translations, those from the

Indian languages into English as well as those of Indo-Anglian writings

into regional languages should be treated as a component of Indian

30 
 
literature. Thus, the study of Indian literature has not only helped in

establishing a wider sense of a national identity within the country but

has also drawn attention of scholars at the international level.

In Indian literature, other forms of literature were quite old

as their foundations were laid down centuries back but the ‘novel’ as

literary genre was new to India. Poetry, epics, drama, short stories and

fables have their old literary history. ‘Novel’ was actually the last to

arrive on the Indian English literary scene. It was only during a period of

little more than a century that the novel-the long sustain piece of prose

fiction-has crop up and taken root in India. At initial level, the Indian

English novel has been reflected upon explored and analyzed from the

perspective of history and historiography, genre and language,

‘Indianness’ and Indian sensibility with the majority of critics date its

beginning back to the mid nineteenth century when the Bengali writer

Bankimchandra Chatterjee published his Raj Mohan’s Wife (1864). In

India, the beginning of the modern novel as a realistic portrayal of

Indian men and women in society and relating back to the European

genre as it had evolved from the 18th century onward has been dated

back to the late second decades of the 20th century.

Indian novels are governed by their writer’s more general and

social interest while a younger generation is more politically and socially

31 
 
aware of contemporary issues. In the second half of the 19th century,

stray novels continued to appear mostly by writers from the Bengal,

Madras and Bombay. A majority of these novels are social and

historical, and their models are obviously the eighteenth and nineteenth

century British fiction, particularly Defoe, Fielding and Scott. An

interesting development is the surprisingly early appearance of women

novelists.

Indian novels in English had begun to be written from various

parts of India, crowded with the varied and variegated pictures of life

from various lands. The cultural lives are both geographically and

socially different, while the common thread is the medium of expression

and the common ground is the context of the British rule. After the end

of the First World War it was found that some of the novelists were

influenced by the ideologies that challenged capitalism and colonialism.

The most prominent of those was Marxism. In Mulk Raj Anand’s novels

we find the operation of the ideology in the background. His Across the

Black Waters, Coolie, Two Leaves and a Bud, Untouchable are faithful

documents of the lives of the downtrodden. His characters also come

alive as real persons of the Indian society. Among other novelist, Raja

Rao is famous for his narrative techniques. He combined the narrative

techniques of Ramayana and Mahabharata with those modern western

32 
 
techniques of Eliot and Joyce. His Kanthapura is put in the mouth of a

grandmother. R. K. Narayan is a powerful novelist having considerable

philosophical bent of mind. It is seen in his novels The Bachelor of Arts

and The Dark Room.

The tragedy of partition provided the writers with the occasion to

write about the plight of the people in the subcontinent in order to bring

home mainly to the western world the impact of British rule, which had

previously boasted of “civilizing mission”. India got Independence

through bloodshed and migration. Khushwant Singh wrote A Train to

Pakistan. His next novel I Shall Not Hear the Nightingale presents an

ironic picture of a joint Sikh family, illustrative of different Indian

reactions to the freedom movement of the forties.

In fact, the partition theme in Indian novels in English set the

dystopian tune, which would be later on carried on to the tone of the

postcolonial theories. Post colonialism began as recognition of the

dominant post-war economic and political conditions prevalent all over

the world.

In the first two decades of twentieth century, the Indian

English novel of the period was deeply influenced by the epoch –

making political, social and ideological ferment caused by the Gandhian

movement. At the time writers like K.S.Venkataramani, Mulk Raj Anand,

33 
 
R.K.Narayan and have started their writing career between the late

1920s and the early 1930s while Bhabhani Bhattacharya, G. V.Desani

and Khushwant Singh’s first works date from the 1940s. Even during

this period around twenty novels originally written in English by Indian

men and women novelists contributed for the new genre of literature in

India. Today, the Indian novelists writing in English are large in number.

Besides Mulk Raj Anand, R.K. Narayan and RajaRao, the three formost

Indian writers of fiction in English, there are also K. Nagrajan, Bhabhani

Bhattacharya, Manohar Malgonkar, Khushwant Singh, Shashi

Deshpande, Kamla Markandya, Anita Desai, Amitav Ghose and many

more. All these novelists have considerably enriched Indian literature.

Among the later writers, the most notable is Salman Rushdie, born in

India, now living in the United Kingdom. Rushdie with his famous work

Midnight's Children (Booker Prize 1981, Booker of Bookers 1992, and

Best of the Bookers 2008) ushered in a new trend of writing. He used a

hybrid language – English generously peppered with Indian terms – to

convey a theme that could be seen as representing the vast canvas of

India. He is usually categorized under the magic realism mode of writing

most famously associated with Gabriel García Márquez. Bharati

Mukherjee, author of Jasmine (1989), has spent much of her career

exploring issues involving immigration and identity with a particular

focus upon the United States and Canada. Vikram Seth, author of A

34 
 
Suitable Boy (1994) is a writer who uses a purer English and more

realistic themes. Being a self-confessed fan of Jane Austen, his

attention is on the story, its details and its twists and turns. Shashi

Tharoor, in his The Great Indian Novel (1989), follows a story-telling

(though in a satirical) mode as in the Mahabharata drawing his ideas by

going back and forth in time. His work as UN official living outside India

has given him a vantage point that helps construct an objective

Indianness. Other authors include, Kiran Desai, Chitra Banerjee

Divakaruni, Raj Kamal Jha, Jhumpa Lahiri, Bharti Kirchner, Amit

Chaudhuri, Vikas Swarup, Rohinton Mistry, Kiran Nagarkar and C R

Krishnan.

Today, Indian literature reached at the apex of creation with the

contributions of regional and national writers. The recent development

in Indian literature is most remarkable in the history of Indian writing in

English. The novel by Arundhathi Roy – The God of Small Things

(1997) won the Booker Prize. The book has brought attention of readers

from every country and made Indian literature identical at globally. This

work is considered as a major contribution to Indian literature.

The Indian English novels not from its beginnings but from about

the time K.S.Venkataramani’s (1891-1951) Murugan, The Tiller (1927)

and Kandan, The Patriot (1934) considered the starting period. Both of

35 
 
these novels have been usually identified as the first ‘Modern’ Indian

English narratives because of their author’s concern with pressing

contemporary political and social issues and their more realistic

presentation. Murugan, the tiller contrasts the careers of two young

south Indian friends – kedari, a flashy materialist finally ruined by his

own deeds, and Ramu, an introvert, whose spirit of public service brings

him spectacular rewards after an unpromising beginning. The novel

ends with Ramu’s founding of an ideal rural colony on Gandhian

principles. The impress of Gandhism is even stronger on

Verkataramani’s second novel- Kandan, the patriot: A novel of New

India in Making (1934) set against the back ground of the civil

Disobedience movement of the nineteen thirties, the novel tells the story

of Kandan, an Oxford educated Indian youth, who resigns from the

Indian civil service to plunge into freedom struggle and finally succumbs

to a police bullet. On other hand, Venkataramani’s story is far more

contemporary than his fictional technique. His hero has a prophetic

dream before he dies and makes a long speech of patriotic exhortation

on his death-bed, Poonam, the government spy is suddenly revealed to

be the long lost brother of the beautiful Kamakshi.

Here at this junction, researcher would like to mention the other

regional languages where novel genre used and finally contributed it by

36 
 
translating it into English. As a researcher in the novel form, it can not

be underrated. In such novels, while translating or in original writing in

English, the indianness and regional environment and regional

languages also found clearly. In Indian Literature, social life is fully

depicted with vagaries and varieties that the novelist with an observant

eye and an understanding heart will find the material spread out before

him to be literary inexhaustible. It is also remarkable that the theme and

technique of novels in Indian literature during this period found based

on social upset, poverty, untouchability, exploitation, social movement,

political movement etc. Iyengar observes;

Some of the best studies of social life are,

naturally enough, in the regional languages;

and it is not easy to translate the racy idioms of

every day speech into English. This is

particularly true of life in the countryside, the

seaside, the hillside where life has, perhaps,

changed very little indeed during the last two

thousand years. Urban life in India attracts the

novelist by its excitements, perversions,

sophistications and violent alternations

between affluence and poverty, splendor and

squalor; but the interior, the areas of obscurity

37 
 
 and inaccessibility have their attractions too,

and sometimes bring out the best in the

creative novelist.8

The history of Indian English literature has one most noteworthy

event in the nineteen thirties was appearance on the scene of its major

trio; Mulk Raj Anand, R. K. Narayan and Raja Rao, whose first novels

were published in 1935, 1935 and 1938 respectively; and it is a mark of

their stature that they revealed each in his own characteristic way, the

various possibilities of Indian English fiction.

Rashipura Krishnaswamy Narayan (1906-2001) is the second of

the “founding trio” of the Indian novel in English. His delicate blend of

gentle irony and sympathy, quiet realism and fantasy stands poles apart

from Anand’s humanism. R.K. Narayan is a writer who contributed over

many decades and who continued to write till his death recently. He was

discovered by Graham Greene in the sense that the latter helped him

find a publisher in England. Graham Greene and Narayan remained

close friends till the end. Similar to Thomas Hardy's Wessex, Narayan

created the fictitious town of Malgudi where he set his novels. For some

critics, Narayan, the parochial, detached and closed world that he

created in the face of the changing conditions in India at the times in

which the stories are set. Others, such as Graham Greene, however,

38 
 
feel that through Malgudi they could vividly understand the Indian

experience. Narayan's evocation of small town life and its experiences

through the eyes of the endearing child protagonist Swaninathan in

Swami and Friends is a good sample of his writing style. Simultaneous

with Narayan's pastoral idylls, a very different writer, Mulk Raj Anand,

was similarly gaining recognition for his writing set in rural India; but his

stories were harsher, and engaged, sometimes brutally, with divisions of

caste, class and religion.

If Anand’s art is committed to expose social injustice, economic

exploitation and the plight of suppressed castes and classes in India

while Raja Rao’s interest lies in exploring the spiritual essence of India,

an ideological movement of Narayan’s work is much less discernible.

William Walsh admires:

If Anand is the novelist as reformer, Raja Rao

the novelist as Metaphysical poet, Narayan is

simply the novelist as novelist.9

R.K.Narayan is the son of a school master. He was also school

master, working as a newspaper correspondent; he has devoted himself

excusive to writing a rare observable fact in the modern Indian

literature. His little dreams of middle class life are enacted in Malgudi,

39 
 
an imaginary small town in south India which comes to be felt as a living

ambience in his fiction. After some works in journalism for a few years,

Narayan has published his first novel Swami and Friends in 1935. This

novel created for the first time the now famous “Malgudi”. It is a

delightful account of a school boy ‘Swaninathan’ whose abridged name

‘Swami’ gives a flavor of Narayan’s writing. Swami is always at the

center of the story or watching through the classroom window the

toddlers of the infant standard falling over one another. His story is that

of the average school boy with its usual rounds of pranks and

punishments but Narayan tells it with such a good humored mockery

and understanding.

In his novel The Bachelor of Arts (1937), Narayan has depicted

the character of Chandran, who is sensitive young man caught in

confect between the western ideas of love and marriage instilled into

him by his educated and the traditional social setup in which he lives.

He carries his frustration to the point of renouncing the world and

becoming a wondering sanyasi. He returns home and finds that the girl

chosen by his parents is really very charming. Narayan makes us smile

gently at chandran’s adolescent groupings. Here, researcher would like

to quote the sum total of Narayan’s writing in this novel in the words of

Iyengar;

40 
 
 The story of their wedded life is a prose lyric on

which Narayan has lavished his best fights as a

writer. Spring is no hard material substance: it

is a presence, it is an unfolding, it is ineffable

becoming that strain after being. A thousand

little occurrences, leaps of light, bubbles of

sound, a thousand smiles revealing their

rainbow magnificence through the film of tearful

happiness or fulfillment, a thousand murmurs of

ecstasy, meaningless worries, tremendous

trifles, a thousand stabs of pain that are

somehow transcended, a thousand shared

anxieties, excitements and adorations: it is out

of these that the texture of wedded happiness

is wrought, and Narayan is an adept at giving

form and meaning to this glory of holy wedded

love. Quotation is difficult because the perfume

is nowhere concentrated but fills the entire

atmosphere.10

The Dark Room (1938) is Narayan’s only attempt to write in a

fictional art. The victim is Savitri who, finding her husband infatuated

41 
 
with a working woman leaves him and the children only to realize that a

traditional middle class Hindu wife is all but helpless. The upshot is not

a powerful drama of emotional crisis but a little storm in a small

domestic tea-cup, more than slightly cracked.

The Guide (1958) is finest novel by Narayan. Here, Railway Raju,

a tourist guide, has an affair with Rosie, the unhappy wife of an

unworldly scholar and makes her a successful professional dancer, but

is jailed for forgery, trying to prevent a possible reconciliation between

Rosie and Marco. Here Raju’s transformation from a railway ‘guide’ into

a half- disinclined and half determined guru is worked out through a

neatly woven pattern of ironic complications, but the end raises many

disturbing questions about human motives and actions, compelling us to

ponder problems such as appearance and reality, the man and the

mask. For R.K.Narayan, Iyengar express that;

Narayan’s is the art of resolved limitation and

conscientious exploration: he is content, like

Jane Austen, with his little bit of ivory, just so

many inches wide: he would like to be a

detached observer, to concentrate on a narrow

scene, to sense the atmosphere of the place, to

snap a small group of characters in the

42 
 
 atmosphere of the place, to snap a small group

of characters in their oddities and angularities:

he would, if he could, explore the inner

countries of the mind, heart and soul, catch the

uniqueness in the ordinary, the tragic in the

prosaic. ‘Malgudi’ is Narayan’s ‘Casterbridge’

but the inhabitants of Malgudi-although they

may have their recognizable local trappings-are

essentially human, and hence, have their

kinship with all humanity. In this sense,

‘Malgudi’ is everywhere.11

The last of the ‘big three’ is Raja Rao. Close contemporary with

Mulk Raj Anand and R.K.Narayan. Raja Rao has a very high sense of

the dignity of this vocation as a writer. He looks to his work in the sprit of

dedication. For him literature is sadhana not a profession but a

vocation. He was deeply influenced by sages Sri Atmanand to whom he

dedicates “The Serpent and The Rope”.

Raja Rao, unlike Mulk Raj Anand and R.K. Narayan, has not

been a prolific novelist, having written just four novels beginning with

Kanthapura(19387) which is perhaps the finest evocation of the

Gandhian age in Indian English Fiction. In Kanthapura, the story was

43 
 
told from the witness-narrator paint of view by an old illiterate village

grandmother, a minor character in the novel, who, like a chorus in tag

reek tragedy, reflected on the circumstances which she witnessed. In

this novel Raja Rao relates the story of a south Indian village -

Kanthapura from which it derives its title- as it recalled to Mahatma

Gandhi’s call of non co-operation. It gives a graphics and moving

description of the National movement in the twenties when thousand of

villages all over India responded in much the same way. In fact, the

initial reaction of Kanthapura to Gandhian thought is one of bored

apathy. But young moorthy, the Gandhian, who knows that the master4

key to the Indian mind is religion, puts the new Gandhian wine into the

age old bottle of traditional story. The struggle is even harder for the

simple. Illiterate village women who don’t understand why and from

where it all and know that the Mahatma Gandhi is right in his work.

Iyengar sums up this novel in words,

“A village, picturesque region, an epoch of

social and political change, a whole complex of

character and motive, reason and superstition,

idealism and cold calculation, are spring up

before owe eyes demanding recognizing and

acceptance: it is almost a tour de force…..”12

44 
 
 Raja Rao’s The Serpent and the Rope (1960) is the greatest of

Indian English novels. This novel, which took ten years in shaping itself,

is a highly complex and many sided novel. Being at once the tragic

story of a marriage of minds which drift apart; the spiritual

autobiography of a learned, sensitive and imaginative modern Indian

intellectual, as also a saga of this quest of self knowledge and self-

fulfillment. The hero “Ramaswami, is a young man of great literary

cultures. He knows many languages, vastly read and widely travelled

man. Being a product of many cultures, Rama’s mind is a seething

whirlpool of cultural currents and cross-currents. Unlike the simple story

teller in Kanthapura, who knew only Indian myths and legends, Rama is

familiar with myths and legends of different civilizations and he can

discern parallels between them and forge a link between the past and

the present by comprehending the essential oneness of history.

Raja Rao has used the myths and legends to highlight the

situation of characters or the relationship between them and to

substantiate or concretize the abstract thought of the hero,

Ramaswamy. The title “The serpent and the Rope” is symbolical and

philosophical as it illustrates the doctrine that just as the rope is often

wrongly taken to be the serpent, the limited self is often regarded the

45 
 
individual soul, which is only an aspect of God. One realizes that the

‘serpent’ is really only a rope, when one who knows points this out

similarly upon being initiated by the Guru; one realizes that Jiva (soul) is

one with Siva. The serpent and the Rope is truly philosophical novel in

that in it the philosophy is not in the story-the philosophy is the story.

Raja Rao’s fiction obviously lacks the social dimension of its two

major contemporaries. Not for him the burring humanitarian zeal of

neither Anand, nor Narayan’s sure grasp of the living description of the

daily business of living. But only his two novels have given him the

same fictional chord of their contemporaries.

III

In the history of Indian fiction, the most prominent writer that

contributed very significantly to Indo-Anglian literature is Mulk Raj

Anand. He was indeed, the true representative of the 20th Century

Indian literary scenario. His literary works reveal that he was not merely

great intuitive observer but penetrating commentator on life. The 20th

century opened with gigantic upheavals in India. Strong forces came in

steadily from outside and fertilized the vast areas of cultural decay and

stagnation. The forty years (1917-1957) bristled with a host of complex

influences and problems. The emergence of Gandhiji, with his steady

46 
 
vision of life as a whole, and the unique Freedom Movement of

unparallel magnitude, forged a new moral order in the national and

international spheres.

Today, none but the incurably chauvinistic would shut their eyes

to the merits of this substantial body of literature, nourished and

sustained as it was. Anand, the internationally known novelist and short-

story writer, is considered by many critics to be one of the best Indian

writers in English. In the diadem of Indian writing in English, he is one of

the luminous jewels. Anand has established the basic form and themes

of Indian literature that is written in English. The most important writer in

the new wave of realism that swept over Indian literature in the 1920s

and 1930s was Anand.

Mulk Raj Anand (1905-2004) was “first” to his name among

modern Indian authors who have chosen the English language as their

medium of expression. He was one of the oldest practitioners in the

field; he has sixteen novels, a novelette and nine collections of short

stories to his credit which rank him the most prolific writer of Indian

English prose.

Novelist, short story writer, art critic, art historian, author of

children's literature, professor, Mulk Raj Anand's contribution to culture

47 
 
and literature is enormous. In the form of books it is around 100

volumes of highly creative, as well as profoundly scholastic, works, all in

English. Mulk Raj was a path breaker. He, in company with Raja Rao

and R.K. Narain, inaugurated the age of what is labeled the Indian

English - or the Indo-Anglian - Novel. Mulk Raj Anand's Untouchable,

was the forerunner of this genre, and the western literary circles pricked

up their ears and eyes to the birth of this new writing. Mulk Raj was

highlighting the life of the poor and the hapless in his country through

his novels and short stories, and he enriched the English language by

introducing into its body a mix of the Punjabi and Hindustani elements

Mulk Raj Anand, a stalwart in the field of Indo-Anglian fiction,

was born on December 12,1905 in Peshawar (now in Pakistan), in a

Kshatriya family (a warrior class), the second highest caste in the four-

fold order of Hindu social hierarchy, but status had been somewhat

debased by his ancestors taking up copper and silver smithying. Lal

Chand, his father, redeemed the situation somewhat by matriculating

and slowly working his way unto becomes Head Clerk in the 38 Dogra

Regiment of the British-Indian Army. Anand’s mother, Ishwar Kaur, was

belonging to an agricultural family. He had inherited the typical qualities

of both his parents. Moreover, the class of society to which he belongs

must also have been responsible for endowing him with a great sense

48 
 
of compassion for the poor, exploited and downtrodden people. Anand’s

early life was lived in the midst of poverty and misfortune. It is possible

that the suffering he saw and underwent in his childhood left a deep

impression on him and later on reflected in his creative writings.

Mulk Raj Anand had miserable childhood that naturally bore

tremendously on his works and ideology. Mulk Raj Anand, at the age of

nine, lost his pretty cousin and playmate, Kaushalya – ‘the first

important crisis of his life’ – came to entertain the gravest of doubts

about divinity which in due course turned him into an atheist,

undermining his faith in established institutions, religious, social or

cultural. With the deep compassion for fellow human beings inherited

from his mother, Anand set out on a quest of a social order, which

would ensure justice, freedom and hope for them. He was deeply

influenced by his mother, Ishwar Kaur, typically Indian, especially in her

love, piety and innocence, lived her daily round of rituals, prayers and

songs. His mother used to tell him stories from Shastras and epics in

which gods and demons, evil and virtuous men embodied the moral

forces governing man’s existence. Anand got a scolding from his father,

Lal Chand Anand, a craftsman in copper, silver and bronze, and an

active member of the Arya Samaj, who rose through the ranks in the

British army. Anand was alienated from his father, who wanted to mould

49 
 
him according to his own image. Lal Chand’s subservience to the British

government worked like a cancer in his heart. His father insisted on an

English education that would train him for a job in the government,

marry a girl chosen by him and face the tedium of the so-called

respectable life. He saw the World War I when he was nine years old.

As a fourteen-year-old boy, Anand was a victim of General Dyer’s

flogging order in 1919. Thus a crusader against imperial oppression

was born. He was not allowed to marry the Muslim girl he loved; deep

loss and guilt were added to despair when the girl committed suicide.

However, Anand grew up in a small world materially poor, spiritually

confined and limited.

His life was not a bed of roses and childhood was a curse for

him. An early acquaintance with suffering prepared him to face the

gross realities of life, which later on became the mainspring of

inspiration for his creative writing. In the loving care of his mother, his

days did pass smoothly; here we can compare Anand with Charles

Dickens as regards to a miserable childhood. Dickens, Premchand and

Mulk Raj Anand were brought up in the dark shadow of poverty and

destitution. They protested against the prevailing evils, not because

they were conscious about them as a writer of social novels but they

themselves had suffered this agony that was later on reflected in their

50 
 
novels. Their novels are peopled with characters who are the most

miserable victims of society.

Mulk Raj Anand has made a significant contribution to the

development of the Indo-Anglian novel, which has acquired an identity

of its own over the years. Although Anand is at times prone to

romanticizing his novels, he has largely freed the Indo-Anglian novel

from the narrow confines of romance within which it had come to be

posited by the earlier exponents. His novels undoubtedly project a lively

image of India, and thus amply reflect his passionate concern with the

surrounding social reality. They exemplify a realistic sensibility of an

artist, capable to plumb the very depths of human personality crushed

under the inhuman social structure.

Whatever the genres – prose, verse, biography, criticism –

Anand’s works bear the stamp of excellence and hall-mark of culture.

Acclaimed as a “writer of revolt” the world over, Anand is a committed

writer who depicts the contemporary scene as to make his reader aware

of his own unenviable condition, of his human predicament.

An institution in himself, Anand is a creative genius whose writings have

influenced generations of intellectuals in India and abroad. He attacks

religious bigotry, established institutions, and the Indian state of affairs

through his socially conscious novels and short stories. He, at the

51 
 
sametime, has enriched the country’s literary heritage. Shyam M. Asani,

in World Literary Today, comments, “Anand writes about Indians much

as Chekhov writes about Russians, or Sean O’ Faolain or Frank O’

Connor about the Irish.

Regarded as a ‘Leftist’, Anand began his career by writing for

T.S. Eliot’s Criterion in the early thirties. He has, so far, to his credit two

dozen novels, twelve collections of short stories and more than twenty-

five books on art and other general subject and thousands of articles

and went on to win international fame with his heart-warming portraits of

the Indian landscape and its working class. Anand says, “as a writer, I

live mostly by my dreams. The writer’s task to translate his dreams into

reality is surely beset with difficulties. But he must make an effort to

extend the bounds of human empire.”

Anand models his novels on the contemporary European and

American novelists, borrowing “social realism from Zola, Dickens,

Tolstoy and Dostoevsky”. Narayan sought to deal almost exclusively

with the lower middle class families of southern Indian with gentle,

sympathetic irony in tragicomic mode, whereas Raja Rao dwelt on the

Puranic Harikatha tradition of story-telling, and made an old village

granny unfold the narrative in autobiographical form.

52 
 
 Mulk Raj Anand’s life and career can conveniently be divided into

three parts: the early years in India until his departure for England

(1905-1925); the years abroad (1925 – 1945) and; the later years in

India, from 1946 to 2004. The principal periods of his residence in India

and abroad correspond with the different stages of his literally career.

The first period reveals the various strands that go into the shaping of

his mind and the influences that later bore upon his writing. The second

period is the most important as it is concerned with Anand’s hard

struggle to become a novelist, and the eventual success that led him to

be rated as ‘the foremost Indian novelist’. However, the third period is

rather a disappointing one. Apart from Private life of an Indian Prince

(1953) and the two sensitive autobiographical novels, Seven Summers

(1968) and Morning Face (1968) his fiction of this period falls far short

of his earlier achievements. But this period is, of course, notable for his

concern with the social and cultural life in India, and especially for his

founding and editing of the art magazine, Marg.

In England, he was admitted for research in philosophy. The

notes in his diary grew gloomier as he was being ill-treated even by the

Indians - the `brown Sahebs' - in England and Churchill put down the

coal miners' strike in 1926. Here he read Johann Wolfgang von Goethe,

Honore de Balzac, Victor Hugo, Leo Tolstoy, Maxim Gorky, Charles

53 
 
Dickens, Thomas Hardy, Rabindranath Tagore and others. During one

of Virginia Woolf's reading sessions at her home that he attended

regularly, a young critic, Edward Sackville, asked him what he was

writing. He replied that he was writing about an outcaste, and the critic

reacted superciliously: "O, there can be no novel about the poor! One

can only laugh at the Cockneys, like Dickens."

In London, Falling in love with Anand, Irene, daughter of his

Ph.D guide Prof.G.Dawes Hicks, found a great appeal in his gift for

story telling – especially his vivid recollections of his mother, aunt and

cousins. She asked him to set down the story of his life on paper, and to

impress her he began a Confession (1926), modeled on Roussea’s

Confessions (1782) that she had given him to read. It must be noted

that it was love and not expediency that intensified Anand’s urge for

creative writing. No wonder, his Confession (1926) ran into 2000 pages.

Though Anand’s career as a novelist did not begin till 1935, his writing

first appeared in print in England in 1929 – soon after completing his

Ph.D. He wrote book reviews for Criterion, then edited by T. S. Eliot.

Prominent literary figures of the day like D.H. Lawrence, E.M. Forster,

Dylan Thomas, Lowes Dickinson, Herbert Read, and Eric Gill helped

Anand in creative writing with valuable suggestions and provided

encouragement necessary for a writer in the making. He worked at the

54 
 
School of Intellectual co-operation of Geneva's League of Nations and

also at the Workers Educational Association of London. But the raging

freedom movement in India dragged him back to his motherland, and he

joined the movement led by Gandhi. He reached Spain to join the fight

of the Republicans against the Fascist General Franco. During the

World War II, he worked for the BBC in London as a script writer. After

the War, he returned to India and worked in various universities as

professor and continued with his writing, which he did forcefully,

keeping the social realities in Indian villages and towns. His writings

have influenced Indian writing in various languages. During his study in

England Anand was drawn towards the progressive faces and he met

eminent writers like Aldous Huxley, D.H. Lawrence, E.M. Forster,

Lawrence Binyon, and Herbert Read. Fascinated by the Marxian

ideology, he came to socialism through Tolstoy, Ruskin and Gandhi. An

exposure to the influence of Marxist dialectics, participation in the anti-

Fascist struggle in Spain, and involvement in the movement for national

resurgence in India resulted in his commitment to socialism and

democracy.

He developed disgust for the crusty and hypocrisy of Indian

feudal life with its caste, creeds, dead habits and customs. For an

55 
 
interpretation of past, Anand thought the Marxian method better but

considered humanism as a more comprehensive ideology.

Anand’s concern in his novels and short stories for the depressed

and downtrodden has a sense of urgency and sincerely, mainly in the

genre of social realism which has an entirely different setting and a

different class of characters. He had already published five books

varying in themes from Indian curries to Hindu view of art, before he

moved to fiction, such as Persian Painting (1930), Curries and Other

Indian Dishes (1932), The Hindu View of Art (1933), The Golden Breath

(1933), The Lost Child and other stories (1933).

An attempt at a story The Lost Child, an allegory for which the art critic,

Eric Gill, did an engraving, found its way in Great Short-stories of the

World (1934) published by Odhams. The course the author’s genius

was to take was now charted, and Anand started off on a series of

novels that would reveal the pattern of Indian life and its movement into

new complexities under the pressure of history. Amongst others,

Dickens and Balzac, Sharat and Premchand gave him a sense of form

as well as of purpose.

In Ireland, Anand met the poets A.E (George Russell) and W.B.

Yeats. When Anand reported to A.E. what Sackville had said, the poet

asked him to go to Gandhi and join his battle against the caste system

56 
 
and imperialism. Anand reached Ahmedabad in March 1927. Gandhi

laughed at Anand's corduroy suit but agreed to look at the manuscript of

Untouchable. The next day he told Anand to refrain from using big

words and write in a simpler language and transliterate what the

`harijans' say. He rewrote the novel at Gandhi's ashram; Gandhi

approved the draft. Nineteen publishers in London rejected the script,

but with E.M. Forster's preface, it was accepted by a publisher.

Untouchable went on to become a modern classic and was translated

into 20 languages. That was the birth of Mulk Raj Anand - the novelist.

Untouchable, which went through nineteen rejections before

finding a publisher, is now acclaimed as an archetypal novel, the best

example we have in Commonwealth literature about conflict between

society and the individual who is trying to free himself from it.

Acclaimed as a minor classic when first published, Untouchable brought

him world-wide recognition which is now available in forty languages,

reprinted several times was reissued in 1970 in the Bodley Head edition

with an ‘Afterword’ by Saros Cowasjee.

Coolie, written with a deeper understanding of the nature of exploitation

in a colonial situation, centers round Munoo, an orphan boy who dies of

tuberculosis brought on by malnutrition. Munoo is not an untouchable,

57 
 
but comprehends great variety and deeper level of degradation than

does the untouchables.

The gift of Anand’s imagination is shown repeatedly when he

writes about crushed humanity as in Two Leaves and a Bud which

brings a new tenderness into contemporary writing. The novel

dramatizes the tragic disintegration of the Gangu family confronted with

the brutal forces of capitalist exploitation. Unlike Coolie, Two Leaves

and a Bud deals with the evils of the class system and covers a wider

range.

Its locale is a tea plantation in Assam and its hero a Punjabi

peasant Gangu - is an extension of same suffering and exploitation.

Two Leaves and a Bud, in spite of its obvious flow like protaganistic

zeal and sentimentalism, strikes one as a far more serious document,

mainly because it has a sound thematic core. Anand in a letter to J.F.

Brown says, “I conceived Two Leaves a Bud as a poem in suffering. I

admit that it is the most bitter of my novels, but is poetic.” Anand

explores the lives of poor Indians in a trilogy, comprising The Village

(1939), Across the Black Water (1940), and The Sword and the Sickle

(1940). It projects the protest of downtrodden against social and political

oppression. The Village centers around the tremors, rages and rebellion

of Lal Singh, the youngest son of a peasant family of Nandpur, during

58 
 
the years immediately preceding and following the First World War, a

period of approximately six years. He is last forced to leave the village

and enlist as a sepoy in the British Indian Army.

The British Raj banned the book in India and this move stimulated

general public interest in Anand’s writing. Glasgow Herald says, ‘The

Village is an incisive, passionate novel with a sensuous flavour of rustic,

characters and their robust love and longings. As a refreshing and

original work of art, Kate O’ Brien writes in the Spectator, ‘The Village

gives a vivid picture of a life that is poor and terrible, but in many

aspects extremely dignified its theme is universal.”

Across the Black Water, the second of the trilogy, deals with the

futility of war. Lalu, the dashing hero of The Village, is merely the mirror

of the scene; his own drama is finished, ranging from his landing in

Marseilles to his capture by the German army. The novel, in an epic

scale, is a clear departure from his earlier novels, both in range and

technique.

The third part of the trilogy, The Sword and the Sickle, a political

novel, places the hero in a tense political situation where it becomes

imperative for him to plunge into revolutionary action. The protagonist

finally returns and involves in political struggle. Returning to his country,

59 
 
he becomes anobody and the army insults him and he is driven away

like a dog.

However, the three novels are epic fragments, not unified wholes.

The trilogy portrays the tragedy of an Indian peasant youth. It is,

however, not simply a personal tragedy; it is the story of the destruction

of the Indian peasantry in a critical phase of India’s history. As the

representation of a generalised human situation, Lalu’s tragedy thus

acquires a social significance. And the trilogy becomes an allegory.

Anand’s first novel Untouchable (1935) is also his most compact

and artistically satisfying work displaying a rare social awareness and

sensitivity. It depicts a day in the life of Bakha, an untouchable sweeper

boy and brings out the impact of various events on him. Untouchable

means exclusion from normal social intercourse and economic

disadvantage. Untouchable employs the same narrative technique, as

do the novels of James Joyce and Virginia Wolf. This technique has

come to be known as the “stream of consciousness” technique. The

novel displays a good deal of human feeling for the sweeper boy. In the

preface to Untouchable (1935), E.M. Forster said that the book is:

60 
 
 Indescribably clean… it has gone straight to the

heart of its subject and purified it.13

Untouchable is a forceful indictment of the evils of a perverted

and decadent social and religious orthodoxy in India. It is also a great

work of art, which presents reality with photographic fidelity and arouses

our sympathy for the waifs and outcasts of society. The work still enjoys

immense popularity for its depiction of the pervading social injustice to

the untouchables in Hindu society. At the end, the novel offers three

possible solutions to the evil of untouchability – Christ, Gandhi, and the

flush-systems.

Anand continued his interest in social themes in his few novels

dealing with the destiny of the working class in India. Anand’s second

novel, Coolie (1936) portrays the distinction between the rich and the

poor and depicts the sad and pathetic life of Munoo, a young boy from

the village of Bilaspur in the Kangra Hills of Himachal Pradesh. Coolie

centered on Munoo, an orphan boy dying of tuberculosis brought on by

malnutrition. It exposes the whole system through its victim's tale of

exploitation. Even in the dreariest of surroundings, the little hero retains

his qualities of warm-heartedness, love, comradeship and curiosity. It

is a human tragedy caused by poverty, exploitation, cruelty, greed and

selfishness. It is not fate or almighty that is responsible for the tragedy

61 
 
of the protagonist Munoo but the society in which he is born and

brought up. He is a victim of social forces like the tragic heroes of

Charles Dickens, John Galsworthy and Victor Hugo. Munoo is a

universal figure that represents the miseries of the poor and the

downtrodden. Social forces of exploitation and poverty determine the

life of Munoo in the novel. David Cecil observers:

A struggle between men on the one hand, and

on the other, the omnipotent and indifferent fate

is the interpretation of human scene.14

All the works of Mulk Raj Anand have outstanding characteristics

of inner studies. Mulk Raj Anand displays a strong influence of Gandhi

in his life and works. It is a remarkable feature of Untouchable that

Gandhi appears in person to speak on evil of untouchability. Anand

produced his bulk of creative writings in English to give voice to the poor

and downtrodden whose fate it is to live in margins of the traditional,

orthodox, and at times, inhuman Indian society. Besides his

Untouchable (1935) and Coolie (1936), Anand has written Two Leaves

and a Bud (1937), a dramatic novel. It deals with the suffering and

misery of the workers on the tea plantations of Assam, who pluck, “two

leaves and a bud”, day in and day out. Two leaves and a Bud was

followed by a group of three novels – The Village, Across the Black

62 
 
Waters and The Sword and the Sickle (1939-42) dealing with the

boyhood, youth and early manhood of Lal Singh, a character that is

based on his father’s personality. The trilogy covers the period of a few

years before World War I to the post-war era in India, marked by

Gandhian struggle for independence.

Like the Untouchable, The Big Heart (1945) is a “Stream of

Consciousness” novel and has the concentration, compactness and

intensity of the earlier novel. It records the events of a single day in the

life of Ananta, the coppersmith, and a man with a big heart like Ratan in

Coolie. Other novel, The Private Life of an Indian Prince (1953) deals

with the collapse of princely India following the country’s independence

and the suffering of the Indian princes. Seven Summers (1951) is a

novel, which forms the first volume in Anand’s fictional autobiography

running into seven volumes in total.

Mulk Raj Anand is social reformer. One of the outstanding

features about his career as creative writer is his humanism combined

with realism. He belongs to the same era and deal with various themes

in his novels as he found in contemporary Indian life. His fictions reflect

the poverty in rural India and social evils prevalent in the early decades

of the twentieth century. his novels depict social, political, and economic

problems: the miseries of children, pitiable conditions of prisoners,

63 
 
slavery, delay in the administration of justice, the gap between the

‘haves and have nots’ and the evils of dowry, maladjustment in

marriage, helplessness of widows, prostitution, untouchability, bribery,

money lending, corrupt police force, impact of western education and

materialism, breaking up of joint family system. his works expose the

complex and variegated web of Indian life at various levels – at the level

of the peasant whose incessant, backbreaking labour does not provide

him even the means of bare subsistence, as well as at the level of the

opulent capitalists and rajas, and struggling middle class people. The

portrayal of these different sections displays both realism and socialism.

The novelist express his deep sympathy with the poor, the oppressed,

and the exploited that include not only peasants and child labourers, but

also poorly paid teachers, writers, journalists etc. However, the women

are the worst sufferers as the victims of a vicious social system as well

as of the base appetites of wicked men. Thus, Anand presents a

panorama of the life of the poorest in the colonial India at a time when

the British rule was showing some of its wickedest features.

It is evident from biographies of Mulk Raj Anand that he had

drunk deep the cup of sorrow and suffering which filled his whole life

with a remarkable bitterness. As a result, all through his novels, he

champion the cause of the ‘have-nots’ and express the sordidness and

64 
 
pains of life, which attempts at awakening the conscience of the

readers.

Mulk Raj Anand was upset by the social status of common man.

Conflict between rural and urban life drew his serious attention. He

empathized with the poor people for their never ending poverty, their

ceaseless hard labor, and their hearts full of sacrifice in such harsh

social conditions. The tyrannies of landlords and moneylenders did not

escape his attention.

Similarly, Anand focuses his attention on the human predicament,

and locates the cause of man’s problems in man himself, in his

selfishness, and his incapacity for tenderness, which should be natural

to mankind. Suffering, of course, is integral to growth and life as what

Saros Cowasjee depicts in So Many Freedoms:

“Pain-pleasure or pleasure-pain The barbarism

and cruelty with which men made millions of

wars and the hatred through which people

extract pain from each other.15

65 
 
 Mulk Raj Anand believes that though people are surrounded by

automatic appliances and all kind of labor-serving devices, mankind is

not happy. Alexander pope observed that ‘The Proper Study of

Mankind is Man’. Anand seems to follow this observation in its right

spirit. He analyses and understands human nature and considers man

to be ‘the maker, and the breaker of world.’ He holds that it is not

divinity but only man who can solve the problems that he has created.

To quote Anand:

Fate! Fate! Fate does not dictate anything

Men are the makers of their own deeds, the

makers of their own character, good or bad and

they are the shapers of their own destiny.16

Humanism implies devotion to the concerns of mankind; it is an

attitude of mind that concentrates upon the activities of man. Anand is a

humanist. His novels bring out human predicament in a very vivid and

lively manner. With a religious zeal, Anand repeats in a number of his

articles: “I believe in man!”. In his usual ebullient fashion, Anand has

asserted, “if you ask me why I write novel, I say it’s because I love. The

love not for oneself or one’s own, but for the entire mankind,

transcending all constricting limitations of caste, creed, and economic or

social status, and all geographical boundaries of nations all of which are

66 
 
man-made. Looking back on how the words I have written come

through in my fiction, I feel that the deeper urging were from the wish to

communicate and be understood, which is, essentially, the desire to be

loved.” For the works of Anand, M.K. Naik rightly says:

R.K. Narayan is the novelist of the individual,

just like as Mulk Raj Anand is the novelist of

the social man.17

Anand’s humanism, his concern for the under-dogs, is reflected in

all his novels, but Untouchable, Coolie and Two Leaves and a Bud are

particularly significant in this regard. These novels deal with the misery

and wretchedness of the poor and their unsuccessful struggle for a

better life. According to Paul Verghese:

Untouchable is a ‘socially-conscious’ novel,

where as Coolie is a “politically-conscious

novel”. These two novels, it cannot be denied,

have served the useful purpose of arousing the

conscience of the educated Indians to the

problems of untouchability and economic and

social injustice in India.18

67 
 
 Almost all of Anand’s subsequent novels are a variation on the

same theme and are intended to bring home the plight of the powerless

but socially and economically over burdened peasant who fights social

conventions and is baulked at every step in his aspirations for a better

life. With regard to Anand’s novels, K. R. Rao rightly remarks:

The human situation in each one comes in for

sharp criticism, but the irony is diluted to some

extent by a tender moving pathos. There are,

indeed, rich, human documents, having varying

degrees of excellence.19

Anand’s commitment to the philosophy of humanism forms the

very basis of his creative enterprises. He takes full responsibility both

as a man and as an artist to strive for the fulfillment of humanistic ideals

in Untouchable. In this way, he discovers his real identity in the

process. In his own words:

I was not only a member of a family risen into

the well-to-do middle class, but that I was one

of the millions of human beings, a member of

the human race who had inherited this terrible

68 
 
 and beautiful world of the 20th century where

everything had to paid for.20

K. R. Srinivasa Iyengar comments on Anand’s deep concern for

the poor:

It was Anand’s aim to stray lower still than even

Sarat Chandra or Premchand, to show to the

west that there was more in the Orient than

could be inferred from Omar Khayyam, Li Po,

Tagore or Kipling; and so he described a waif

like Munoo in Coolie, an untouchable like

Bakha, an indentured labourer like Gangu, and

set them right at the centre of the scheme of

cruelty and exploitation that held India in its

vicious grip.21

The influence of Tolstoy, Morris, Ruskin, and Gandhi, however,

moderated his views on socialism, which pervades throughout his

Untouchable. Anand’s Coolie sharpens his profound sense of

humanism and deepens his moral tone. It corresponds greater variety

and deeper levels of degradation that does Untouchable. Here K. R. S.

Iyenger rightly judges:

69 
 
 If Untouchable is a microcosm, Coolie is a

macrocosm that is Indian society. 22

The Old Woman and the Cow is about the underprivileged

women in Indian society, The Big Heart is woven around a coppersmith

whose existence is threatened by mechanization. Across the Black

Water, another of Anand's widely translated works, is about a peasant

hero who joins the army only to fight another's war. The agony of the

sepoy is reproduced here in ironic good humour. In The Sword and the

Sickle, this hero is back in India to join the peasant movement floated

by M.N. Roy and Kanwar Brajesh Singh (who later married Svetlana,

Soviet communist leader Joseph Stalin's daughter). Anand wrote this

novel while staying with the peasants in Kalakankar. It was published at

the same time as Ignazio Silone's Bread and Wine that dealt with a

similar theme.

Anand's later novels, while retaining his passion for social justice,

show greater depths of emotion and achieve a synthesis of the social

and personal concerns. Private Life of an Indian Prince is an example of

this integration. Based on his experience with lost love, Anand

convincingly explores the psychological workings of its hero. The novel

is constructed around a youthful prince who holds out against a union

with the rulers of three other princely States. He is encouraged to make

70 
 
his choice by his mistress, an illiterate peasant woman. But in the

process he loses his mistress, his state and his sanity. In the words of

S. Cowasjee, who has studied Anand's work closely, this is a "great

historical novel that is at the same time a work of art". He calls it a

"Dostoevskyian novel on a grand scale".

In addition to these novels, Anand intermittently worked on a

proposed seven-volume series of autobiographical novels titled The

Seven Ages of Man. Of these, Seven Summers and Morning Face -

which won the Sahitya Akademi award - earned him comparisons to

Tolstoy. Confession of a Lover, which won him the E.M. Forster award,

and the Bubble continued to represent the aspirations of a whole

generation of Indian youth in a momentous period of the country's

history. Anand's short stories, which run into eight volumes, illustrate a

wide range of mood and tone, from a humorous appreciation of life's

little ironies to an awareness of its deeper tragedies. They are written

with a Dickensian feeling for character and environment and bridge the

gap between the oral and written traditions of Indian fiction.

However, Anand’s humanistic zeal often carries him off his feet

and exposes him to the charge of partiality and propaganda. In this

context, Meenakshi Mukherjee is of the view:

71 
 
 Anand is a rational humanist, in the western

tradition, believing in the power of sciences to

improve material conditions, in progress and in

the equality of all men, and his manifest

intention is to propagate his beliefs through his

novel.23

It is apparent that Mulk Raj Anand attacked not only the existing

systems, but also the forces working behind them. He has his own

vision to eradicate these social evils in the national interest.

Therefore, art for Mulk Raj Anand was not for art’s sake only. He

loved those flowers, which bring fruits; he loved those clouds, which

shower water he could love beauty not only for its own sake but also for

the sake of life. No doubt, idealism, humanism and realism existed in

the works of the novelist, though in different proportions. Mulk Raj

Anand wished to convey a profound meaning to his people. He wrote

for society itself. Being social reformer, he always wished to uproot the

failings and frailties of the society.

Thus, he as realist and with a deep sense of humanism and

compassion for the poor, the backward and the downtrodden and as a

72 
 
stylist with command over a language which can be truly called the

people’s language and mastery over the language for Mulk Raj Anand,

narrated his works with the sympathy and full of love for victims. His

works reflect the extreme level of suffering of their downtrodden

protagonists without any crime and fault of their own. Mulk Raj Anand

has a close concern for the miserable people and the underdog of the

society.

With deep analysis of Anand’s works, this researcher comes to

the conclusion that there are untouched areas for Anand’s works which

requires research. It is true what K. R. Srinivasa Iyengar remarks:

There are novelists about whom one critical

study could be written, but one would be

enough. There are novelists who would be

effectively suffocated even by one research

performance. And there are the novelists who

are large who invoke multitudes- who can

survive several attempts to probe and sound

and contain them. Mulk Raj Anand is surely of

the last category. Each new study adds a little

to our understanding of Anand and his work,

yet leaves the subject unexhausted.24

73 
 
 On the base of the literary history of Indo-Anglian literature and

the rise and development of novel in Indo-Anglian literature, it is my

humble endeavor to study the major novels- Untouchable, Collie, Two

leaves and a Bud and The Big Heart – of Mulk Raj Anand in the light of

Social Realism which is one particular untouched aspect and not

studied comprehensively and methodically. My aim in this research

work would be to study the major novels of Mulk Raj Anand in the light

of social realism and real socialism. It would further aim at examining

various social, religion, political, economical and cultural reality in India.

Through this research work, the researcher would like to exhibits this

new aspect of Anand’s writing and also to explore his contribution as a

reformer and scientific humanist.

74 
 
 CHAPTER - 1

INTRODUCTION

Literature is one of the fine arts that employs “language” as a

medium of expression. It is essentially an expression of human feelings,

emotions, sufferings and joys. Good literature is never outdated and

knows no bounds of place and time. It is permanent. It is also universal,

in the sense that it appeals to readers across national or linguistic

boundaries. Language or culture may be different but human

sentiments remain essentially the same in all literatures of the world.

Among the literatures of the world, Indo-Anglian literature is dynamic

branch and has great inheritance commencing from the Vedas and it

has continued to spread its mellow light and it is part of Indian literature,

a modern facet of the glory which has ancient treasure of divine

thoughts.

In India, there are different languages and literatures. India is

country where the cultural root is the same though there are marked

differences in regional literatures owing to the genius of respective

languages in which they are written. There are certain movements that

have deeply affected each of the regional Indian literatures. Though,

there are so many regional literatures in India as there are languages

but the essential thread is the same and they weave a beautiful organic

7 
 
References:

1. K.R.Srinivasa Iyengar, Indian Writing in English (New Delhi:

Sterling Publishers Pvt. Ltd., 1995), p.33.

2. Ibid., p. 44.

3. Ibid., p. 103.

4. M.K.Naik, A History of Indian English Literature (New Delhi:

Sahitya Akademi, 1995), p.52.

5. K.R.Srinivasa Iyengar, Indian Writing in English (New Delhi:

Sterling Publishers Pvt. Ltd., 1995), p.206.

6. M.K.Naik, A History of Indian English Literature (New Delhi:

Sahitya Akademi, 1995), p.69.

7. Ibid., p. 129.

8. K.R.Srinivasa Iyengar, Indian Writing in English (New Delhi:

Sterling Publishers Pvt. Ltd., 1995), p.327.

9. William Walsh, R.K.Narayan: A Critical Appreciation (New Delhi:

Allied Publishers, 1993), p. 6.

10. K.R.Srinivasa Iyengar, Indian Writing in English (New Delhi:

Sterling Publishers Pvt. Ltd., 1995), p.367.

11. Ibid., p.360.

12. Ibid., p.392.

13. E.M.Forster, In the preface to Untouchable (London: Lawrence &

Wishart, 1935), p. 1.

14. Manmohan Bhatnagar ed. Indian Writing in English (Delhi:

Atlantic Publishers, 1997), p.182.

75 
 
________________________________________________________

15. Saros Cowasjee, So Many Freedom: A Study of The Major

Fiction of Mulk Raj Anand (Madras: Oxford Uni.Press, 1977), p.7.

16. Mulk Raj Anand, The Big Heart ( Hutchinson : International

Authors, 1945), p.205.

17. M.K.Naik, Ironic Vision (Delhi: Sterling publishers, 1963), p.1.

18. Paul Verghese, Problems of Indian Creative Writing in English

(Delhi: Book Enclave, 1998), p.27.

19. K.R.Rao, Anand in Untouchable. Osmania Journal of English

Literature, Xii (16). 2.

20. Mulk Raj Anand, Apology For Heroism (Bombay: A.P.H., 1957),
p. 20.

21. K.R.Srinivasa Iyengar, Indian Writing in English (New Delhi:

Sterling Publishers Pvt. Ltd., 1995), p.334.

22. Ibid.,p.367.

23. Meenakshi Mukharjee, The Twice Born Fiction( New Delhi:

Heinemann Educational Book, 1971), p.27.

24. K.R.Srinivasa Iyengar, “Forward” to G.S.Balarama Gupta’s Mulk

Raj Anand(A Study of His Fiction In Humanist Perspective)
(Bareilly: Prakash Book Depot, 1974), p.(V).

76