Mulk Raj Anand

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Mulk Raj Anand

12 December 1905
Born
Peshawar, British India (now Pakistan)

28 September 2004 (aged 98)

Died
Pune, India

Occupation Writer

Period 20th century

Signature
Mulk Raj Anand (12 December 1905 – 28 September 2004) was an Indian writer in English,
notable for his depiction of the lives of the poorer castes in traditional Indian society. One of the
pioneers of Indo-Anglian fiction, he, together with R. K. Narayan, Ahmad Ali and Raja Rao, was
one of the first India-based writers in English to gain an international readership. Anand is
admired for his novels and short stories, which have acquired the status of being classic works of
modern Indian English literature, noted for their perceptive insight into the lives of the oppressed
and their analyses of impoverishment, exploitation and misfortune.[1][2] He is also notable for
being among the first writers to incorporate Punjabi and Hindustani idioms into English.[3]

Contents
[hide]

 1 Early life and education

 2 Career
 3 Literary style
 4 Novels
 5 Autobiographies
 6 See also
 7 References
 8 External links

Early life and education[edit]

Born in Peshawar, Anand studied at Khalsa College, Amritsar, graduating with honours in
1924,[3] before moving to England, where he attended University College London as an
undergraduate and later Cambridge University, earning a PhD in Philosophy in 1929. During this
time he forged friendships with members of the Bloomsbury Group. He spent some time in
Geneva, lecturing at the League of Nations' School of Intellectual Cooperation.

Career[edit]
Anand's literary career was launched by family tragedy, instigated by the rigidity of the caste
system. His first prose essay was a response to the suicide of an aunt, who had been
excommunicated by her family for sharing a meal with a Muslim woman.[4][5] His first main
novel, Untouchable, published in 1935, was a chilling exposé of the day-to-day life of a member
of India's untouchable caste. It is the story of a single day in the life of Bakha, a toilet-cleaner,
who accidentally bumps into a member of a higher caste.

Bakha searches for a salve to the tragedy of the destiny into which he was born, talking with a
Christian missionary, listening to a speech about untouchability by Mahatma Gandhi and a
subsequent conversation by two educated Indians, but by the end of the book Anand suggests
that it is technology, in the form of the newly introduced flush toilet that may be his saviour by
eliminating the need for a caste of toilet cleaners.
This simple book, which captured the puissance of the Punjabi and Hindi idiom in English was
widely acclaimed and Anand won the reputation of being India's Charles Dickens. The
introduction was written by his friend, E. M. Forster, whom he met while working on T. S.
Eliot's magazine Criterion.[6] Forster writes: "Avoiding rhetoric and circumlocution, it has gone
straight to the heart of its subject and purified it"

Inevitably, Anand, who in the 1930s and '40s spent half his time in London and half in India,[3]
was drawn to the Indian independence movement. During his time in London, he wrote
propaganda on behalf of the Indian cause alongside India's future Defence Minister V. K.
Krishna Menon, while trying to make a living as a novelist and journalist.[7] At the same time, he
also supported freedom elsewhere around the globe and even travelled to Spain to volunteer in
the Spanish Civil War, even though his role in the conflict was more journalistic than military.
He spent World War II working as a scriptwriter for the BBC in London, where he became a
friend of George Orwell. Orwell penned a favourable review of Anand's 1942 novel The Sword
and the Sickle and remarked that "although Mr. Anand's novel would still be interesting on its
own merits if it had been written by an Englishman, it is impossible to read it without
remembering every few pages that is also a cultural curiosity," adding that the growth "of an
English-language Indian literature is a strange phenomenon".[8] He was also a friend of Picasso
and had Picasso paintings in his collection.

Anand returned to India in 1946, and continued with his prodigious literary output there. His
work includes poetry and essays on a wide range of subjects, as well as autobiographies, novels
and short stories. Prominent among his novels are The Village (1939), Across the Black Waters
(1939), The Sword and the Sickle (1942), all written in England, and Coolie (1936), The Private
Life of an Indian Prince (1953), perhaps the most important of his works written in India. He
also founded a literary magazine, Marg, and taught in various universities. During the 1970s, he
worked with the International Progress Organization (IPO) on the issue of cultural self-
comprehension of nations. His contribution to the conference of the IPO in Innsbruck (Austria)
in 1974 had a special influence on debates that later became known under the phrase of
"Dialogue Among Civilizations". Anand also delivered a series of lectures on eminent Indians
including Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru and Rabindranath Tagore, commemorating their
achievements and significance and paying special attention to their distinct brands of humanism.

His 1953 novel The Private Life of an Indian Prince was more autobiographical in nature. In
1950 Anand embarked on a project to write a seven-part autobiography, beginning in 1951 with
Seven Summers. One part, Morning Face (1968), won him the Sahitya Akademi Award.[9] Like
much of his later work, it contains elements of his spiritual journey as he struggles to attain a
higher sense of self-awareness.

He died of pneumonia in Pune on 28 September 2004 at the age of 98.[10]

Literary style[edit]
Anand, who was associated with Communism, used his novels to make broad attacks on various
elements of India's social structure and on British rule in India; they are considered important for
their social statement.[11]
Novels[edit]
 Untouchable (1935)
 Coolie (1936)
 Two Leaves and a Bud (1937)
 The Village (1939)
 Across the Black Waters (1939)
 The Sword and the Sickle (1942)
 The Private Life of an Indian Prince (1953)

Autobiographies[edit]
 Seven Summers (1951)
 The Morning Face (1968) - won the Sahitya Academy Award (Best Literature award) in
India.

See also[edit]
 List of Bloomsbury Group people

References[edit]
1. Jump up ^ "Very English, more Indian". The Indian Express. 29 September 2004. ("...it can be said that
they have taken over from British writers like E. M. Forster & Edward Thompson the task of interpreting
modern India to itself & the world"), The Oxford History of India, Vincent A. Smith (3rd edition, ed.
Percival Spear), 1967, p. 838.
2. Jump up ^ Ranjit Hoskote (29 September 2004). "The last of Indian English fiction's grand troika:
Encyclopaedia of arts". The Hindu.
3. ^ Jump up to: a b c "Mulk Raj Anand Profile", iloveindia.com.
4. Jump up ^ C. J. George, Mulk Raj Anand, His Art and Concerns: A Study of His Non-autobiographical
Novels, New Delhi: Atlantic Publishers, 1994.
5. Jump up ^ Shailaja B. Wadikar, "Silent Suffering and Agony in Mulk Raj Anand's Untouchable", in Amar
Nath Prasad and Rajiv K. Malik, Indian English Poetry and Fiction: Critical Elucidations, Volume 1, New
Delhi: Sarup & Sons, 2007, p. 144–155.
6. Jump up ^ "Mulk Raj Anand", Penguin India.
7. Jump up ^ Cowasjee, Saros. So Many Freedoms: A Study of the Major Fiction of Mulk Raj Anand, New
Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1977.
8. Jump up ^ Orwell, George. The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell – My Country
Right or Left 1940–1943, London: Martin Secker & Warburg, 1968, pp. 216–220.
9. Jump up ^ Sahitya Akademi Award recipients in English
10. Jump up ^ Jai Kumar and Haresh Pandya, "Mulk Raj Anand" (obituary), The Guardian, 29 September
2004.
11. Jump up ^ Berry, Margaret (1968–1969). "'Purpose' in Mulk Raj Anand's Fiction". Mahfil (Michigan State
University, Asian Studies Center) 5 (1/2 1968-1969): 85–90.

Untouchable (novel)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jump to: navigation, search
This article is about the Mulk Raj Anand novel. For the John Banville novel, see The
Untouchable (novel).

Untouchable

Title Cover

Author Mulk Raj Anand

Country India

Language English

Genre Novel

Publication date 1935

Media type Print

ISBN 978-0-14-018395-5
 OCLC 22686185

Followed by Coolie

Untouchable is a novel by Mulk Raj Anand published in 1935. The novel established Anand as
one of India's leading English authors.[1] The book was inspired by his aunt's experience when
she had a meal with a Muslim woman and was treated as an outcast by his family.[2][3] The plot of
this book, Anand's first, revolves around the argument for eradicating the caste system.[4] It
depicts a day in the life of Bakha, a young "sweeper", who is "untouchable" due to his work
cleaning latrines.

Publication history[edit]
The book was first published in 1935.[5] Later editions carried a foreword written by E. M.
Forster.[2] In 2004, a commemorative edition including this book was launched by Indian Prime
Minister Manmohan Singh.[6]

References[edit]
1. Jump up ^ "Mulk Raj Anand, 98; Wrote About India's Injustices". Los Angeles Times. October
1, 2004. Retrieved 2009-08-31.
2. ^ Jump up to: a b "Indian author Mulk Raj Anand dies". BBC. September 28, 2004. Retrieved
2009-08-31.
3. Jump up ^ "Mulk Raj Anand, R.I.P.". September 28, 2004. Retrieved 2015-01-15.
4. Jump up ^ Bhatnagar, Manmohan Krishna; Mittapalli Rajeshwar (2000). The novels of Mulk Raj
Anand: a critical study. Atlantic Publishers. p. 69. ISBN 978-81-7156-934-2. OCLC 237560616.
Retrieved 2009-08-30.
5. Jump up ^ "Mulk Raj Anand draws closer to 100". The Times of India. December 11, 2003.
Retrieved 2009-08-31.
6. Jump up ^ "PM releases special commemorative edition on Mulk Raj Anand". Govt of India,
Press Information Bureau. December 11, 2004. Retrieved 2009-08-31.

[hide]

 v
 t
 e

Works of Mulk Raj Anand

 Untouchable
Novels  Coolie
  Two Leaves and a Bud
 The Village
 Across the Black Waters
 The Sword and the Sickle
 The Private Life of an Indian Prince

Payal Khullar | College Teacher | (Level 2) Associate Educator

Posted September 23, 2013 at 11:17 AM (Answer #1)

dislike4like

Untouchable, written by the Indo-English writer Mulk Raj Anand, has a simple but very
uncomfortable, depressing plot. The novel’s protagonist is "Bhaka", who is an untouchable,
outcast boy. The novel is historical in the sense that it touches upon the caste system, which gave
rise to the practice of “Untouchability” that was much prevalent in the Indian society.

The entire plot gives an account of events happening in a single day in the life of Bhaka.
It exposes the harsh life and struggles of the so-called Untouchable people. Bhaka doesn’t like to
do toilet cleaning. He wants to study and be a learned man. Much of the novel’s success lies in
the revolutionary idea of education of Untouchables. The outcasts were not allowed to draw
water from wells, enter temples or basically touch anything, as everyone believed that their touch
would make anything impure and corrupt. Bhaka is also mentally and physically abused by the
upper caste Hindus. Pandits, or the upper-caste Hindus, are hypocrites as one of them tries to
touch Sohini’s (Bhaka’s sister) breasts but claims to have been defiled when touched
accidentally by an "Untouchable".

In the end of the novel, Mulk Raj Anand presents three answers to this malpractice. Bhaka is
offered to accept Christianity that has no caste system, and so in this way he will no longer be an
outcast. But Bhaka fears such a religion change, even if that means equal treatment and
opportunity to visit a church. After that Mahatma Gandhi comes to Bhaka’s village and educates
everyone on Untouchability. Bhaka loves to hear someone talking on behalf of people of his
caste. In the concluding paragraphs, a person randomly comes into the scene and informs
everyone about a machine (toilet-flush machine, perhaps) that will clean faecal matter
automatically, ending manual collection of excreta. Bhaka thinks that this will be a solution to all
his problems.

Social Realism in Mulk Raj Anand's Untouchable

karan Gutte / 6 yrs ago /

Untouchable is Mulk Raj Anand's first novel and it brought to him immense popularity and prestige. This
novel shows the realistic picture of society. In this novel Anand has portrayed a picture of untouchable
who is sweeper boy. This character is the representative of all down trodden society in pre-
independence of India. The protagonist of this novel is the figure of suffering because of his caste. With
Bakha, the central character, there are other characters who also suffer because of their lower caste.
They live in mud-walled cottages huddled colony in which people are scavengers, the leather-workers,
the washer men, the barbers, the water-carriers, the grass-cutters and other outcastes. The lower castes
people are suffering because they are by birth outcaste. But Mulk Raj Anand had depicted the hypocrisy
of the upper caste people that men like Pt. Kali Nath enjoy the touch of the Harijan girls. Mulk Raj Anand
exposes all this hypocrisy and double standard or double dealing. In this novel Bakha is a universal figure
to show the oppression, injustice, humiliation to the whole community of the outcastes in India. Bakha
symbolizes the exploitation and oppression which has been the fate of untouchables like him. His
anguish and humiliation are not of his alone, but the suffering of whole outcastes and underdogs.

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Untouchable E-Books: Mulk Raj Anand, Modernism, and Technology

Aug 21st, 2013 | By Amanda Golden | Category: Feature

My English 1102 “Modernism: Technology and Communication” course last spring asked how people
around the world communicated before the internet. Starting with the advent of the telegraph, we
addressed written, oral, visual, electronic, and nonverbal forms of communication through the nineteen
thirties. We began the course with Tom Standage’s The Victorian Internet (1998) and then considered
the ways that World War One changed relationships in Rebecca West’s Return of the Soldier (1918).
When we read Nella Larsen’s Passing (1929), nonverbal communication provided a vocabulary for
examining the ways that the characters responded to passing and social conventions. Evelyn Waugh’s A
Handful of Dust (1934) presented a rich case study, with telephones, telegrams, and forms of
transportation enabling infidelity and fatality.
Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable (1935) presented a unique challenge.[1] The protagonist’s ability to
communicate is limited—being untouchable means that one cannot be touched, or touch others. And
yet, the novel also depicts the ways that the sweeper Bakha communicates and the world he navigates.
Early in the novel, Bakha’s sister must retrieve water for her family, but as an untouchable she is unable
to draw it from the well herself. One student found this to be a central moment of communication in
which the members of different castes come together. At the well, readers also see exchanges among
members of the same caste and learn more about the characters’ relationships with each other.

For their third project, the students designed an interactive e-book annotating two to three pages of a
text that we read for an iPad, e-reader, tablet, phone, or computer. We used as examples the recent
iPad applications (apps) of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. Along with their
e-books, the students composed a 250-word rationale addressing their design choices, the arguments
that their e-book makes, and the significance of their e-book’s written, oral, visual, electronic, and
nonverbal components.

Many students chose to make e-book versions of Untouchable because, as one student put it, it is the
novel we read that needs the most annotation. With the technology available, students were able to
include images of landscapes, references, and people as well as harness different forms of internet and
digital capabilities. One student created links to the foods in the novel so that a reader could order them
online and have them delivered as he read. Another student made recordings of himself interpreting the
passages that readers could listen to as they considered the text.

The students used a variety of programs to make skillful and engaging e-books, including Microsoft
Word, Power Point, Prezi, and iBooks Author. iBooks Author was particularly successful because of its
aesthetically pleasing templates. The students also enjoyed turning the pages of their fully functional e-
books on the iPad.[2] iBooks Author combines multimedia, text, graphics, and has features like a
glossary, which students found useful for the references in Anand’s novel.

Figure 1

The sleek design of the first page of the student’s e-book in Figure 1, for instance, has a calming effect,
inviting readers to turn the page and paradoxically engage with the less attractive reality of the novel’s
latrine cleaner, which the student introduces in the last line of his summary. The semi-transparent box
with curved edges, an Apple trademark, partly overshadows the image on the cover of our paperback
copy of the novel. This image suggests the world that lies behind the technologically savvy overlay and
of which one can catch digital glimpses within the e-book’s glossy packaging.

The project provided students with a means of engaging transnational modernism. Untouchable
introduces the complex ethical issues at stake in the caste system, as Jessica Berman argues in
Modernist Commitments: Ethics, Politics, and Transnational Modernism, and can allow students to gain
broader, global understanding of modernism.[3] As we read and discussed the novel, particularly after
several novels critiquing social relations in England and America, Untouchable presented a new
geographical and social landscape. Berman resolves that “[t]he dilemma the novel seems to address,
then, in both its content and its form, is how to place the ethical potential of the sweeper boy at the
center of the story of untouchability and build from it new narratives of justice for India” (5).

Figure 2

Creating e-books brought structure into relief, and the students grappled with not only what passages to
annotate, but also how to depict Bakha’s role in society, his response to it, and our responses as
readers. In the rationale that accompanied the e-book in figures one through three, the student
explained that the passages he selected to annotate “show the transition of how Bakha is described as a
hardworking man first, whom one should look upon and call a man as opposed to him being degraded to
the status of an untouchable.” As we discussed the novel, several students from India shed light on the
contemporary state of the caste system, particularly with regard to universities, where places are held
for descendants of lower castes out of a desire to compensate for past injustices. As they annotated
their e-books, students also provided information regarding the structure of the caste system and the
contemporary role of untouchables in India.

Figure 3

Annotation draws students’ attention to language, but in many ways, an e-book will never provide a
substitute for a lengthy essay in which students participate in a larger critical conversation, analyzing the
text and the issues it presents in depth. However, a project like an e-book lets students imagine the
future of digital textuality and begin to distinguish among digital resources that are available.
Introducing global texts to new audiences, the students are also contributing to new critical
conversations and recent Postcolonial Digital Humanities initiatives.[4]

In my “Digital Woolf” class this fall, the students will be mapping Jacob’s Room (1922), and a similar
challenge will be making sense out of Virginia Woolf’s novel without losing sight of the haze that lies
over it.[5] In groups, students will use Google Maps to create an annotated, interactive map for guiding
readers through one segment of the novel. These sections are indicated on the syllabus so that students
can create drafts of their maps as we read the novel. In addition to the characters’ movements, the
students’ maps can include captions with quotations from the novel, street views of the locations,
historical information, and links to media. The students will then be researching the locations and
contexts informing their segments of the novel further and demonstrating for the class how their maps
work and the significance of their research during their group presentations. Revisiting each segment of
Jacob’s Room as students give their presentations will enable the class to interpret the ways that
language, history, and geography shape Woolf’s fragments and the whole that they form. Combining
mapping tools, close reading, and research in this way, students can more thoroughly engage with
aspects of “modernist narrative,” in which Berman argues “rhetorical activity exists in constant and
perpetual relationship to the complex, various, and often vexing demands of the social practices,
political discourses, and historical circumstances of modernity and the challenges they pose to systems
of representation” (7-8).

What does students’ digital scholarship mean for the future of modernism? In the previous instance, it
enables first-year students to read Woolf, following the example of other English 1102 classes on David
Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest and James Joyce’s Ulysses.[6] Male students also still outnumber female
students at Georgia Tech, making Woolf an even tougher sell. Mapping Jacob’s Room will allow students
to spend a significant amount of time with a male protagonist. Ultimately, teaching Woolf at Georgia
Tech will draw out the significance of the writer as an engineer of language and engineers’ ability to
create new art in response to it.

By Amanda Golden

[1] Mulk Raj Anand, Untouchable (1935; New York: Penguin Books, 1940).
[2] One difficulty of iBooks Author is that it is meant to create books that will be published on iTunes and
available to the general public. If you would like to keep students’ work private, the book files can be
emailed and opened on iPad to read it as a fully functional e-book in iBooks. The e-book file needs to be
small, however, for this to be possible.

[3] Jessica Berman, Modernist Commitments: Ethics, Politics, and Transnational Modernism (New York:
Columbia UP, 2011), 9. Parenthetical citations correspond to this edition.

[4] Adeline Koh and Roopika Risam, Postcolonial Digital Humanities.

[5] See also the Mapping Mrs. Dalloway Project.

[6] See Julie Hawk’s article about her English 1102 course on Infinite Jest, “Infinite 1102: A Collective
Romp through Infinite Jest, Part I.”

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Tags: Anand, annotation, digital humanities, iBooks Author, Jacob's Room, Untouchables, Woolf

One Comment to “Untouchable E-Books: Mulk Raj Anand, Modernism, and Technology”

Postcolonial Digital Humanities | Untouchable E-Books: Mulk Raj Anand, Modernism, and Technology
says:

August 23, 2013 at 8:05 am

[…] Amanda’s post first appeared on TechStyle on August 21, 2013. The original is available here. […]

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