Fall of a Titan
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SHIV K. KUMAR recalls his many associations with Mulk Raj Anand and notes that his passing away has created a vacuum in contemporary Indian English writing.
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UNCLE Mulk is no more. The last outpost has fallen on the darkling plain after the passing away of R.K. Narayan, Dom Moraes and Nissim Ezekiel. Honoured with the Padma Bhushan, the Sahitya Akademi and several other international awards, Mulk Raj Anand will always be remembered as the doyen of Indian English writers, spanning about seven decades. He was "uncled" by many young writers because he offered his generous patronage to every new literary aspirant. He was not like most other celebrities who are often niggardly in recognising new talent.
Authentic articulation
Mulk Raj Anand felt catapulted into literary fame by E.M. Forster's glowing foreword to his novel Untouchable (1935), followed by Coolie (1936) and a string of both novels and collections of short stories: Across the Black Waters, Two Leaves and a Bud, The Sword and the Sickle and Confessions of a Lover. His forte lay in articulating authentic emotion, because most of his fictional writing was structured around intensely felt personal experiences.
Like Khushwant Singh, he was not a believer. To him God was a teaser whose dispensations were capricious, unjust and irrational. The genesis of Mulk's agnosticism might be traced to his shock, at the age of 11, over the death of his nine-year-old cousin, Kaushalya. This provoked him into writing a letter to God asking "why He had taken Kaushalya away." This letter was presumably his first piece of writing and in it, Mulk found his voice as an agnostic. Later on, his agnosticism was deepened by his reading of the great debate in "The Grand Inquisitor", a scene in Brothers Karamazov. So it was this curious mix between denial and Marxism which awakened him to the predicament of the labouring classes in his own country.
Role of creativity
In the early 1950s, Mulk and I entered into a spirited argument over the function of creative writing. In an article I wrote in 1955 on progressive writers, I had, somewhat harshly, dismissed such political literature as mere rhetoric and propaganda. I had also quoted a couplet by Iqbal, a poet Mulk admired very much. It said:
Agar kajroh hain anjum
Asman tera hai ya mera.
Mujhe fikre jehan kyon ho
Jehan tera hai ya mera.
(If the stars have gone awry,
the sky is yours, not mine.
Why should I lend myself to angst
When the universe is yours, not mine?)
To this Mulk reacted quite sharply, in a letter dated November 6, 1955:
May I ask, however, why you denigrate the obsession of these Indian writers with underdogs? Does not 80 per cent at least of the population of our country live in the most sordid and abject poverty? And are the writers merely to wish away the social and human cause... ?
These words certainly unhinged my critical stance and I confessed to him my misjudgement. Indeed, I always lauded Mulk's forthright convictions which sprang from a genuine transparency. As I now look at his letters, written to me over the past four decades, — letters humane or strident, compassionate or pungent — I notice that he never wrote with malice towards anyone, even when his words sometimes sounded somewhat harsh.
Let me share with the readers his incisive assessments of Salman Rushdie, V.S. Naipaul, Nirad Chaudhuri and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. In his letter of August 7, 1982, he wrote:
The question of Salman Rushdie's novel does not arise as far as I am concerned. Rushdie is a clever young man (perhaps too clever by half as the English say). He writes very eloquently in the English language but in Midnight's Children, he is aping the recent Americans by disembowelling his mother, painting his grandmother as a scheming old witch, his grandfather as a burglar, his father as a mere crook, and he himself as superior to all his colleagues. I suppose he is brighter than the others, but in the kind of way in which the average advertising copywriter is brighter than every other copywriter. India appears to be a spittoon to Salman Rushdie. I suppose it is as it was a vast sewage to Katherine Mayo before the war, or it is the "Continent of Circe" to that third-grade actor Nirad Chaudhuri, as it is "an Area of Darkness" to V.S. Naipaul, as it is "Heat and Dust" to Ruth Jhabvala...
Nor does he spare Aurobindo in this letter of May 20, 1987:
I don't deny intellectual apperceptions to Sri Aurobindo, but the Miltonic epic style can only express itself in rounded statements. Blake was also a mystic, but knew the contraries...
Comprehending reality
Mulk Raj Anand implies that unless a poet can confront the complexities of life, its incoherencies and paradoxes, he cannot comprehend reality in its entirety. This ironic mode of perception is, therefore, the only way to understand the tension at the heart of poetic craft.
In another letter (dated April 5, 1986), Mulk perceives death as an inevitable end to human existence. When he had a stroke in that year, I wrote to him in fear and trembling. In response, he said:
I am moved by your concern for me. Actually it was a false alarm... But you know, my dear Shiv, that decay is inevitable at eighty. But I am fighting it, if only to say my say.
His panacea for overcoming the dread of extinction lay in returning to his writing:
For three hours, from 6.00 to 9.00 in the morning (I write) and, of course, the cycle of pain and pleasure, gets mixed up into the Christian cross, all for Art, since I am finishing the 3rd part of 5th volume of the confessional And So He Played His Part.
Like Dostoevsky, he believed that a writer discovers himself in his creations and that he has no other vocation.
Mulk Raj Anand's death has indeed created a vacuum in contemporary Indian English writing that will not be filled for many years to come. We are now left mostly with literature that is loaded with sex and violence, traits that never tainted the work of R.K. Narayan, Raja Rao and Mulk Raj Anand — the illustrious triumvirate of yesteryears.
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