Mulk Raj Anand Omnibus

Raj Anand Mulk

Description

the Mulk raj anand Omnibus is a tribute to one of the founding fathers of the Indian novel in English. Mulk Raj Anand (1905-2004) is best known for the impassioned social critique contained in his writings. This special commemorative edition published on the eve of his 100th birth anniversary brings together three of Anand's finest novels which capture the ambivalence of a nation caught between tradition and modernity: Untouchable (1935), coolie (1936) and private Life of an Indian prince (1953)

Sujets

• Idioma inglés
• English
• India
• Anglais

Informations

• Publié par: Penguin Books Ltd
• Date de parution: 02 novembre 2004
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9788184754599
• Langue: English

Extrait

The Mulk Raj Anand Omnibus
UNTOUCHABLE COOLIE PRIVATE LIFE OF AN INDIAN PRINCE
EDITED, WITH AN INTRODUCTION, BY SAROS COWASJEE
VIKING
Contents
Dedication
Introduction
Untouchable
Coolie
Private Life of an Indian Prince
A Select Glossary
Copyright Page
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
Untouchable:
A remarkable work Movingly told, it is both sad and violent, a book that reminds us constantly of the depths of our cruelty and of our absurdity.
-William Trevor in the Guardian
A profoundly moving story of one day in the life of a scavenger in an Indian city Of its authenticity no doubt can exist.
-Compton MacKenzie in the Daily Mail
Coolie:
Mr Anand s picture is real, comprehensive and subtle, and his gifts in all moods from farce to comedy, from pathos to tragedy, from the realistic to the poetic, are remarkable [He] has a marvellous power of evoking an immensely varied life as it bubbles in front of his eyes
-V.S. Pritchett in London Mercury
Munoo is a universal kind of figure. His is the passion not only of India but of mankind.
-Peter Burra in Spectator
Private Life of an Indian Prince:
It is claimed as the final and definitive work of Mulk Raj Anand. I accept that claim, and recommend a most rewarding and memorable novel.
-John D. Stewart in the Irish Times
It is a psychological work on a grand scale; its scope is Dostoevskian If Anand had written nothing else, his place in the history of the novel would be secure-his place as a profound interpreter of Indian life in a phase of pervasive crisis.
-Jack Lindsay in The Elephant and the Lotus
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 anoth