Classic Mulk Raj Anand Read online

  EDITED, WITH

  AN INTRODUCTION, BY SAROS COWASJEE

  Classic Mulk Raj Anand

  UNTOUCHABLE

  COOLIE

  PRIVATE LIFE OF AN INDIAN PRINCE

  Contents

  About the Author

  Praise for the Author and his Books

  Dedication

  Introduction

  Untouchable

  Preface

  Chapter 1

  Coolie

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Private Life of an Indian Prince

  Author’s Note

  Part 1

  Part 2

  Part 3

  Footnote

  Introduction

  Chapter 1

  Epilogue

  Glossary

  Follow Penguin

  Copyright

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  CLASSIC MULK RAJ ANAND

  MULK RAJ ANAND (1905–2004) was born in Peshawar and educated at the universities of Panjab and London. After earning his PhD in 1929, Anand began writing notes for T.S. Eliot’s magazine Criterion and reviewing books, among other things, to make a living. Success came in the mid-1930s with the publication of his first two novels, Untouchable and Coolie, and by the time he returned to India in 1946 he was the best-known Indian writer abroad.

  Making Bombay his home and centre of activity, Anand threw himself headlong into the cultural and social life of India. He founded and edited the fine-art magazine Marg, wrote his masterpiece Private Life of an Indian Prince (1953) and some of his best short stories. He has been the recipient of the Sahitya Akademi Award, several honorary doctorates and other distinctions. Anand’s complete papers are now housed in the National Archives (New Delhi) in a room specially named after him.

  SAROS COWASJEE is Professor Emeritus at the University of Regina in Canada. His published works include two novels, Goodbye to Elsa (1974) and The Assistant Professor (1998), and a collection titled Strange Meetings and Other Stories (2006). He has also done critical studies on Sean O’Casey and Mulk Raj Anand, and edited several fiction anthologies, including The Oxford Anthology of Raj Stories (1998).

  PRAISE FOR THE AUTHOR AND HIS BOOKS

  ‘As an interpreter of the East to the West, Mulk Raj Anand is among the most remarkable of contemporary novelists’—Glasgow Herald

  ‘Mulk Raj Anand writes about the Indians much as Chekhov writes about the Russians or Sean O’Faolain or Frank O’Connor write about the Irish. At the same time his manner is quite his own. Mr Anand’s writing has an attractive sensuous quality. He somehow charges his pages with heat, colour, scents (or smells). He has, most of all, the touch, the power that makes the writer great—he can give human weakness a dignity of its own’—Elizabeth Bowen, Tatler

  To sweet Dolly, for her selfless devotion and unstinting support through our long years together

  Introduction

  Untouchable:

  Written over a long weekend in 1930, Untouchable was revised several times during the next four years. By September 1934, it had been rejected by some nineteen publishers. Exhausted and demoralized, Anand contemplated suicide but was saved by the timely intervention of a young British poet, Oswell Blakeston, who took the manuscript to Wishart Books. Edgell Rickwood, the editor, liked the novel for its ‘sincerity and skill’ but was quick to point out that the prospect of good sales must affect their decision, and a preface from E.M. Forster would certainly help. Forster had already read the novel while it was making its rounds of the publishers’ desks, and supplied the necessary preface. ‘We could not have had anything better,’ declared Rickwood on reading it, and Untouchable hit the bookshelves in May 1935. Anand’s career as a novelist had begun.

  The story in the conventional sense hardly exists. The novel deals with a day in the life of Bakha, a sweeper-lad of eighteen whose job is to clean latrines. His day is made up of a series of incidents, some sad, some happy, which alternate with studied regularity to evoke varying responses from him. Before we are half through the book, Anand piles up hard upon one another three humiliating experiences on his hero to raise the novel to its climax: a slap from a caste Hindu for polluting him, a priest molesting his sister, and a housewife vilely abusing him. When Bakha returns home his father, Lakha, Jemadar of the sweepers, roundly berates him and his cup of frustration and misery is full. From this point onwards, Anand again reverts to the technique of alternating pleasant with unpleasant episodes, except that Bakha’s few pleasures are now tainted with the memory of previous misfortunes. The novel concludes on an ambivalent note: Bakha is neither happy nor unhappy as he listens to the missionary, sways with the crowd that has assembled to hear Gandhiji speak, and, from a non-polluting distance, attempts to follow the harangue of a poet whose discourse ranges from nirvana to modern plumbing.

  Anand’s judicious arrangement of the various episodes that build up the emotional crisis in the hero’s life contributes significantly to the story’s success. So does the gentle and balanced writing which does not move us to instant indignation. It is only after we have put the book aside and ruminated on Bakha’s fate that the full implication of the tragedy becomes evident—a tragedy of a large section of mankind ostracized and condemned to misery. Conscious of the magnitude of his theme, Anand wisely opens on a low key (Bakha lying half-awake dreaming of the life of the Tommies), and the most violent incident in the novel is a slap that Bakha receives from a passer-by. Given the plight of the untouchables at the time the novel was written, Anand could have inflicted any torture he wished on his hero and remained within the bounds of credibility. But whether he could have moved us more is doubtful. Let it be said at once that the book gains much of its strength from the author’s depiction of the emotional crisis in Bakha’s life without hysteria, and from the treatment of a political subject without political jargon.

  Bakha is a charismatic person, modelled on a sweeper-boy Anand had known in his childhood and adored as a hero. He is described as intelligent, able-bodied and strong, with ‘a sort of dignity that does not belong to the average scavenger’. The contrast between his natural potential and his present degradation has in it a strong echo of the punkah-puller in E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India:

  When that strange race nears the dust and is condemned as untouchable, then nature remembers the physical perfection that she accomplished elsewhere, and throws out a god—not many, but one here and there, to prove to society how little its categories impress her. This man would have been notable anywhere; among the thin-hammed, flat-chested mediocrities of Chandrapore he stood out as divine, yet he was of the city, its garbage had nourished him, he would end on its rubbish heaps.

  Bakha differs from the general run of sweepers in that he is clean, is a champion at games, has principles and a strong sense of duty. But in his physical inability to rebel, his submission, his habitual subservience to superiors who insult him, he is at one with the vast majority of the outcastes. After heredity and 2000 years of oppression have done their work on him, he has few resources left. He goes about his job wearing the smile of humility so customary among outcastes. The slightest show of kindness to him brings forth an effusion of gratitude and humility, which is basically a part of his obsequiousness. However, excessive abuse can spur him to regain his strength and self-respect. At such moments he appears, we are told, a ‘superb specimen of humanity’, ‘his fine form rising as a tiger at bay’. But he is a tiger in a cage, securely imprisoned by the conventions his superiors have built to protect themselves against the fury of those whom they exploit.

  Bakha’s slavish emulation of the Tommies serves several useful
purposes. It enables him to establish his identity and to escape temporarily from his sordid existence. It affords Anand an opportunity to maintain an ambivalent attitude towards his character, and to censure him mildly when the occasion demands it. But above all, it provides much of the humour in the book; there is something laughable about a sweeper-boy stumping around in discarded artillery boots, breeches and regulation overcoat to look like a sahib. It is pathetic, too, when the fantasy breaks down and he realizes that ‘except for his English clothes there was nothing English in his life’. But such moments are few, and the sahibs are a vital presence to him. It is only after he hears the Mahatma that the English police officer at the public meeting, though clad in all the trappings that had earlier fired his imagination, seems to him insignificant and out of place—the representative of an order that has nothing to do with the aspirations of the people.

  Anand has been able to create in Bakha an authentic person who compels attention. His success is not solely because the character has been taken from real life (the reader’s notion of ‘real life’ and the novelist’s can be hopelessly apart), but because of what Henry James calls ‘the power to guess the unseen from the seen’. He has felt, in his role of a novelist, Bakha’s helplessness, despair, blighted hopes and agony to such a degree that he has become an untouchable himself. So strong indeed is Anand’s identification with his hero that for the best part of the novel we forget the presence of the novelist. In each and every episode, what Bakha says and does is in complete accordance with his character and position in life. The most unforgettable of them all is the one in which Bakha goes to sweep the temple courtyard.

  Everything in this episode is exact. We have the sweeper’s preoccupation with his job, the sinister appeal of the temple to the uninitiated (something akin to Forster’s Marabar Caves), his overpowering urge of obeisance to the gods, the hypocrisy of the temple priest who tries to molest Bakha’s sister, the cowardice of the ‘twice-born’ Hindus, the hero’s immediate impulse to revenge the insult to his sister and, not least, his failure to do so. Bakha’s moment for action has come and gone, and it is in his failure to act that the fidelity of the novel lies.

  Since the social impulse is at the core of Anand’s writing, he finds irony—which works largely through contrasting appearance with reality—a particularly useful tool. Untouchability, which can have no moral or religious sanction, is particularly vulnerable to ironic treatment. The novel unfolds with a child of modern India shackled by age-old traditions; the Hindus, who pride themselves on their cleanliness, gargle and spit in the stream and pollute the water, while a person incomparably cleaner than themselves is treated like dirt; the sub-castes among the apparently casteless untouchables and their claims to superiority over one another; orthodox Hindus who worship a stinking bull but will not touch a human being; the hypocrisy of Hindu women, who like the sweepers to call them ‘mother’ but treat them as pariahs; Hindu temples which a murderer can enter but not those who keep its grounds clean; and the peculiar Hindu notion of ‘pollution by touch’ and ‘pollution from a distance’.

  The ruling classes too come in for criticism. Englishmen, after years of residence in India, have learnt only a few useful imperatives and swear-words such as ‘acha’ (good), ‘jao’ (go away), ‘jaldi karo’ (be quick), ‘sur ka bacha’ (son of a pig), ‘kute ka bacha’ (son of a dog).1 The missionary’s wife in Untouchable sums up the attitude of most memsahibs—an attitude which Orwell believed would cost England her Indian empire. The missionary himself, for all his genuine efforts, has failed to transplant himself to Indian soil, and the presence of his irreligious wife makes a mockery of his attempts at proselytizing the heathens. But in this novel it is not the rulers Anand is really concerned with but the depravity that has infested Indian society since the first Aryan invasion.

  The novel concludes with three possible choices for Bakha. He could embrace Christianity as offered by the Salvation Army missionary, Colonel Hutchinson, and no longer be considered an untouchable (not a bad choice and one accepted by millions of his brethren). But he finds the missionary boring and muddled, and excuses himself with the thought that ‘the religion that was good enough for his forefathers was good enough for him’. The second choice is to lay faith in the Mahatma’s speech on the evils and shame of untouchability. In spite of Bakha’s immense enthusiasm for the Mahatma, in real terms the offer is elusive, for the untouchables must patiently wait for a change of heart in their fickle countrymen. The third choice, offered by a young poet, Iqbal Nath Sarashar, is the flush system—‘the machine which clears dung’. If Bakha’s predilection is for the flush system, it is understandable, for it makes no demands on his religion, or on the compassion of others.

  Forster was quick to see that the ending of Untouchable, like that of his own novel A Passage to India, was likely to draw criticism. To stave off attack, he defended Anand’s conclusion in the ‘Preface’, calling the three choices offered to Bakha ‘the necessary climax . . . mounted up with triple effect’. In doing so, Forster opened the conclusion up to critical attention it may not have otherwise received on its first publication. The Evening News, Star, and Glasgow Herald took issue with Forster, but neither had anything concrete to offer in return. Whatever be the case, no thoughtful reader can miss seeing the hope embodied in the novel—that ‘on the surface of the earth if not in the depths of the sky, a change is at hand’. Untouchability has not yet been rooted out in India—but the lot of the untouchables has improved visibly throughout the subcontinent.

  Coolie:

  Coolie (1936) shares with Untouchable not only Anand’s social anger, but also its immense popularity (the two books have been translated into more than twenty world languages). But in Coolie, the unities of time, place and action, so central to Untouchable, are no longer employed; the exigencies of the plot are swiftly dismissed, the canvas is much wider and the characters more varied. The novel is a study in destitution, or, to use Peter Quennell’s words: ‘India seen third-class—a continent whose bleakness, vastness, and poverty are unshaded by a touch of the glamour, more or less fictitious, that so many story-tellers, from Kipling to Major Yeats-Brown, have preferred to draw across the scene.’

  Munoo, a hill-boy, leaves his idyllic surroundings in the Kangra valley so that he may work and see the world. Arriving at the house of a bank clerk, he falls foul of a shrewish and vindictive housewife, and before he flees from his employers’ frenzied rage he has relieved himself at their doorstep and thereby lowered their social prestige. He next finds himself in a primitive pickle and jam factory in the feudal town of Daulatpur, where a quarrel over money between his employers uproots him and sends him to Bombay as a worker in a cotton mill. He sweats to earn his bread in appalling conditions when, eventually, he is knocked down by the car of an Anglo-Indian woman who takes him to Simla as her servant. Here he dies of tuberculosis (which is aggravated by his having to pull the rickshaw for his mistress), watching the peaceful hills and valleys he had deserted for the plains.

  The novel relates a series of adventures in picaresque manner, only the hero is no rogue but himself the victim of the world’s rogueries. Unlike Bakha in Untouchable, it is not his place in the old caste system that is questioned, because he belongs by birth to the second highest order. What is questioned is his place in the new caste system, on the basis of the cash nexus, that the Kaliyug, the Iron Age, has established. The magic of the book is in Munoo’s innocence, in his naïve warm-heartedness, his love and comradeship, his irrepressible curiosity and his zest for life. He belongs with some of the more endearing juvenile characters in modern literature: with Victor Hugo’s Gavroche and Dickens’ David Copperfield. But he is no tragic hero. When he dies, nothing of any real consequence seems lost—nothing but his own lust for life. Yet such is the force of the author’s pity that it seems much good has gone to waste.

  Coolie marks a big departure from Untouchable in many ways, but most noticeably in technique. Untouchable is confined to
a single day in the life of a sweeper-boy in a cantonment city, with the episodes carefully selected and organized with a view to exploring the mind of the hero; and the prose chiselled and maintaining an even pace throughout. Coolie, on the other hand, covers vast spaces, contrasts rural with urban life, and the action is spread over several months. We traverse with Munoo half the subcontinent: from his village in the extreme north to Bombay—India’s commercial capital in the south-west. We meet a vast number of characters, and see an immensely varied life. The change in the tempo of the prose is modulated to suit the changing scenes, as in the transition from the pastoral first chapter to the urban second chapter. Munoo’s journey from Daulatpur to Bombay is another instance where the narration is attuned to the varying speed of the train, vividly bringing to life the cities and the types of vegetation he rushes past.

  The novel is divided into five chapters. The first is purely introductory, giving us a glimpse of Munoo’s life in his village—the memory of which haunts him till his early death. The second chapter brings Munoo to Sham Nagar as a servant in the household of Babu Nathoo Ram, a minor bank clerk angling for promotion. Constantly abused and ill-treated, Munoo’s inquisitiveness and zest for life partly compensate for his misery. But the most unforgettable episode in this chapter is the tea party arranged by Nathoo Ram for the English chief cashier, Mr W.P. England, to get from him a letter of recommendation. The fiasco with which this encounter between east and west ends has never been bettered in Indian fiction, and is equalled only by the fiasco of the tiger hunt in Private Life of an Indian Prince.

  Apart from its undoubted literary qualities, the episode is significant for two other reasons. First, it is perhaps the best refutation of a criticism levelled against the author that he does not fully understand his English characters and is thus unable to portray them faithfully. But where in Indian fiction is there a more authentic portrait of a colonial Englishman than that which we have in Mr W.P. England? It is true that some of Anand’s English characters suffer in comparison to his Indians, such as those who appear in the Bombay chapter, but the reason is not that the author does not understand them, but rather that the spleen of the man gets the better of the artist. Second, the episode illustrates Anand’s belief (one he shared with George Orwell) that the British rule not only exploited the country’s natural resources, but debased the character of those Indians who were in its service. It created a body of sycophants, looking up to the English, fawning, cringing, becoming a ready tool of exploitation in the hands of the masters. And they lost their sense of humanity and human decency. Nathoo Ram in this chapter and the Todar Mals in the next chapter have been dehumanized in the service of the Raj and have lost all fellow-feeling.