INTRODUCTION

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, Ahmed Ali and Raja Rao, was one of the first India-based writers in English to gain an international readership.1 ndian novelist, short-story writer, and art critic, who was among the first writers to render Punjabi and Hindustani idioms into English. Called the Zola or Balzac of India, Mulk Raj Anand drew a realistic and sympathetic portrait of the poor of his country. Anand, who was the founding member of the Indian Progressive Writers' Association, has been regarded with Raja Rao and R.K. Narayan as one the "founding fathers" of the Indian English novel. "And he had soon become possessed with an overwhelming desire to live their life. He had been told they were sahibs, superior people. He had felt that to put on their clothes made one sahib too. So he tried to copy them as well as he could in the exigencies of his peculiarly Indian circumstances." (in Untouchable, 1935) Mulk Raj Anand was born in Peshawar, the son of Lal Chand, a coppersmith and soldier, and Ishwar Kaur. From early on Anand rebelled against his father's subservience to the British authorities. His first texts were born as a reaction to the trauma of the suicide of an aunt, who had been excommunicated for dining with a Muslim woman. An unhappy love for a Muslim girl, who was married, inspired some of his poetry. Anand attended Khalsa College, Amritsar, and entered the University of Punjab in 1921, graduating with honors in 1924. Thereafter Anand did his additional studies at Cambridge and at London University, Intellectual Cooperation in Geneva. Anand started to write at an early age. Although Punjabi and Hindustani were Anand's mother tongues, he wrote in English, because English language publisher did not reject his books due to their themes. Anand began his career in England by publishing short reviewes in T.S. Eliot's magazine Criterion. His acquaintances from this time included such authors as E.M. Forster, Herbert Read, Henry Miller, and George Orwell, who tried to get Anad a full-time post at the BBC. The most important influence upon Anand was Gandhi, who shaped his social conscience. Between 1932 and 1945 Anand lectured, on and off, at Workers Educational Association in London. His first wife, the actress Kathleen van Gelder, Anand met in London, where he represented India in the International Writers Conference against Fascism. Anand and Gelder married in 1939 and had one daughter.
1

"Very English, more Indian". The Indian Express. Sep 29, 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 (third edition, ed. by Percival Spear), Oxford, 1967, p. 838.

In the early 1930s Anand focused on books on art history. It was not until the appearance of the novels Untouchable (1935) and Coolie(1936), the story of a fifteen year-old childlabourer who dies of tuberculosis, that Anand gained a wide recognition. Untouchable narrates a day in the life of Bakha, an unclean outcaste, who suffers a number of humiliations in the course of his day. Bakha is eighteen, proud, "strong and ablebodied", a child of modern India, who has started to think himself as superior to his fellowoutcastes. The "touching" occurs in the morning, and subsequently shadows the rest of the day. Due to his low birth, Bakha's fate is to work as a latrine sweeper. A symbolic figure, Baksha stands for all untouchables and their sufferings. The powerful critique of the Indian caste system suggested that British colonial domination of India has actually increased the suffering of outcastes, such as Bakha, who feels that there is a "moral barrier" between human beings. Anand later recalled, that the book "poured out like hot lava from the volcano of my crazed imagination during a long weekend. I remember that I had to finger exercise in order to ease the strain on my right hand. And I must have slept only six hours in three nights, while writing this drama."2 After 19 rejection slips from various British publishing houses, Anand contacted Wishart Books, a small avant-garde publisher. Edgell Rickword, editor at Wishart, agreed to publish the book on condition that E.M. Forster provide a preface. "Untouchable could only have been written by an Indian and by an Indian who observed from the outside," wrote Forster. "No European, however sympathetic, could have created the character of Bakha, because he would not have known enough about his troubles. And no Untouchable could have written the book, because he would have been involved in indignation and self-pity." The 1970 edition of the book was dedicated to reformist writer K.S. Shelvankar and M.K. Gandhi; the latter also figures as a character within the story. Originally the manuscript comprised about 1,000 pages, and was rooted in the social conscience of Maxim's Gorky's story Creatures that Once were Men, and the aesthetics of James Joyce's Ulysses. Along with the novelista and short story writer Munshi Premchand (1880-1936), Anand was involved in forming dalit literature, used to refer to the "untouchable", casteless sects of India. In Two Leaves and a Bud (1937) Anand continued his exploration of the Indian society. The story told about a poor Punjabi peasant. He is brutally exploited in a tea plantation and killed by a British official, who tries to rape his daughter. The socially conscious work shared much with the proletarian novels published in Britain and the United States during the 1930s. Anand's famous trilogy, The Village (1939), Across the Black Waters (1940), and The Sword and the Sickle (1942), was a strong protest against social injustices. The story follows the life of Lai Sing from adolescent rebellion through his experiences in World War I, to his return

Ranjit Hoskote (Sep 29, 2004). "The last of Indian English fiction's grand troika: Encyclopaedia of arts". The Hindu.

home and revolutionary activities. In Anand's early novels his social and political analysis of oppression grows clearly from his involvement with the Left in England.3 In the 1930s and 1940s, Anand divided his time between literary London and Gandhi's India, but he also fought with the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War, where he met George Orwell. Anand associated himself with the British Labour Party and the Indian National Congress. Joining the struggle for independence, he became an activist of India League organized by Krishna Menon, who later served as high commissioner for India. During World War II, Anand worked as a broadcaster and scriptwriter in the film division of the BBC in London. At that time Orwell served in the BBC's Far Eastern Service. Orwell had a remarkably good memory and Anand once said, that he used to quote lenghty passages from the Book of Common Prayer. After the war Anand returned to India, partly because his marriage was ending and partly due to the new future in the Independent India. He stayed in Lahore for a year, and made then Bombay his permanent hometown and center of activity. In 1946 he founded the fine-arts magazine Marg at the advice of Anil de Silva, a young journalist from Bangalore. Anil was also a founder member of the Indian People's Theatre Association. Breaking her promise to marry him and marrying a Frenchman, with whom she went to Paris, Anand suffered a nervous breakdown and was nursed back to healt by a Greek dancer. From her suggestion Anand wrote Private Life of an Indian Prince(1953), in which he focused more on human psyche and personal struggles than on class conflicts. The story had its origins in the betrayal. From 1948 to 1966 Anand taught at Indian universities. He became a director of Kutub Publishers and was busy in attending or organizing many national and international conferences. In the 1960s he served as Tagore Professor of Literature and Fine Art at the University of Punjab and visiting professor at the Institute of Advanced Studies in Simla (1967-68). Between the years 1965 and 1970 Anand was fine art chairman at Lalit Kala Akademi (National Academy of Arts). In 1970 he was appointed president of Lokayata Trust, for creating a community and cultural center in the village of Hauz Khas, New Delhi. After divorce in 1948, Anand married Shirin Vajibdar, a distinguished dancer. Anand's daughter Sushila from his first marriage became a writer, too. Since the 1950s, Anand intermittently worked on a projected seven-volume autobiography, entitled Seven Ages of Man, in which he appeared under the name Krishan Chander. The work was inspired by lines from Shakespeare's play As You Like It: "All the world's a stage / And all the men and women merely players: / They have their exits and their entrances; / And one man in his time plays many parts, / His acts being Seven ages." From the project appeared Seven Summers (1951), set in Punjab, Morning Face (1968), dealing with the period from the beginning of WW I to the Jallianwala Bagh Massacre in 1919, Confessions of a Lover (1976), about Krishan's years

1.

^ http://books.google.co.in/books?id=M7LSHdlvRtcC&pg=PA8&dq=mulk+raj+anand+aunt+muslim&hl=en&sa =X&ei=ehMqUbuPNNCykgWY8oH4Aw&ved=0CD4Q6AEwAg#v=onepage&q=mulk%20raj%20anand%20aun t%20muslim&f=false

at Khalsa College, and The Bubble (1984), in which Krishan encounters an art student named Irene Rhys. The fifth part, entitled as And So He Plays His Part, was planned to be seven novels in one. The first was Little Plays of Mahatma Gandhi (1991), in which Krishan lives in Gandhi's ashram at Sabarmati and works on a novel. Anand also published books on subjects as diverse as Marx and Engels in India, Tagore, Nehru, Aesop's fables, the Kama Sutra, erotic sculpture, and Indian ivories. Mulk Raj Anand died in Pune on September 28, 2004. He was cremated with full state honours. Some years before his death, Anand wrote his own obituary, saying self-mockingly that the "fellow cannot be denied a certain amount of virtuosity. But it was this very flair for turning his hand to philosophy, politics, writing, stage, film, dance choreography, cookery as well as poetry, that was the most dangerous thing about him." 4

http://books.google.co.in/books?id=g2DHBzEO9UEC&pg=PA144&dq=mulk+raj+anand+aunt+muslim&hl=en&sa=X&ei =ehMqUbuPNNCykgWY8oH4Aw&ved=0CEQQ6AEwAw#v=onepage&q=mulk%20raj%20anand%20aunt%20muslim&f= false

MULK RAJ ANAD AS FIGHTER

The Indian novelist Mulk Raj Anand passed away at the grand old age of 98 last September. He was arguably the greatest exponent of Indian writing in English, whose literary output was infused with a political commitment that conveyed the lives of Indias poor in a realistic and sympathetic manner. He had been involved in Indias freedom movement, been impressed by Marxs letters on India and his general political framework and had been a cofounder of Indias greatest literary movement in the 1930s. I had the pleasure of meeting with him at his home in Khandala, outside Bombay, in March last year. Despite illness and fraility he was able to recall some of his earlier memories of life in London and India vividly.5 Born into a family of metal workers with an army background in Peshawar, he witnessed the bloody reality of colonial rule with the Jaillinwalla massacre at Amritsar in 1919. Like most Indians of his generation he threw himself into Gandhis non-cooperation movement. This led him into student agitation against the British for which he received 11 stripes on his back and was briefly jailed. The experience had a deep impact on the young Anand and he concluded that notions of Empire and Freedom were complete opposites: I had grown up in the ferment of a great moral and political movement in which I had learnt that alien authority constricted our lives in every way. I cant say there was no bitterness in my hatred of imperialism, because I remember how often waves of fury swept over me to see hundreds of human beings go to jail daily after being beaten up by the police for offering civil disobedience.16 It was partly to escape further arrest, but also to avoid the petty bourgeois ambitions of his soldier father, that Anand came to study at University College London in the autumn of 1925. Unlike most Indian students at the time he had to work in Indian restaurants and later for a publishing firm to earn his keep as his family were not in a position to fully finance his studies or maintenance. But he also became part of the literary crowd known as the Bloomsbury group. Here he met writers such as T S Eliot, Leonard and Virginia Woolf, E M Forster and John Strachey among many others. This literary elite both impressed him and left him feeling quite perplexed and uncomfortable. London at that time was the centre of the English-speaking intellectual world and Anand had hoped to meet with like-minded individuals who shared his anti-colonial liberal views. To his surprise he discovered that, according to Eliot, Gandhi was an anarchist and that Indians should concentrate on cultural aspects of their society and leave the politics of governance to the British! Many of these writers had not visited India and so their impressions were formed by Rudyard Kiplings Kim, which to Anand was typical of colonial fantasies of India. It was partly in response to these perceptions that he wanted to write.2 As an Indian student in London, Anand found
5 6

Mulk Raj Anand: novelist and fighter in International Socialism 105, 2005. Mulk Raj Anand, "The Search for National Identity in India", in: Hans Kchler (ed.), Cultural Selfcomprehension of Nations. Tbingen (Germany): Erdmann, 1978, pp. 7398.

himself popular with the literary set and, fortunately for him, not all writers were as parochial as Eliot. He soon found himself drawn to the Woolfs and, more importantly, E M Forster. Anand held A Passage to India to be the best fictional writing on his homeland, as this went beyond the orientalist conceptions of the natives and attempted to depict the complex, often contradictory and mostly confrontational impact of colonial rule in India. He had wanted to write about the ordinary, the mundane, everyday life experiences of Indians who were not kings and gods. James Joyces Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man impressed Anand greatly as it was a new literature infused with Irish nationalism. In 1927 Anand went to Ireland and enjoyed the writings of Yeats because his works represented the lives of ordinary people in villages and towns. This was to be his model as he set about writing his first novel, Untouchable, published in 1935. It is a story based on the life of the most downtrodden, despised and oppressed section of Indian society, the outcastes those at the bottom of the caste hierarchy. This story is based on a single day in the life of Bakha, a latrine cleaner and sweeper boy. We follow him round on his daily chores cleaning up the shit of the rich and powerful, who despise him because of strict social rules governing ideas of purity and pollution. When he walks down the streets he has to signal an alarm with his voice as he approaches so that the pure are forewarned to avoid even allowing his shadow to be cast upon them. On one occasion he does pollute a caste Hindu and is chased, abused and attacked all day long for this defilement. Anand was born into the kshatriya warrior caste, which is placed one below the top caste of the Brahmins priests. He had always befriended and played with the children of sweepers and as a child he had been shocked and disgusted by the suicide of a relative who had been disowned by his family for daring to share her food with a Muslim, for this too was regarded as pollution. Anand had always been disgusted with and opposed religious sectarianism, communalism and caste society. His soldier father had been involved with a Hindu reform movement, Arya Samaj. But Anand kept his distance, for despite its opposition to child marriage and the prohibition of widow remarriage, the movement was also quite evangelical in its attempts to re-convert Muslims to the true faith. To Anand it harboured deep antiMuslim sentiments with which he would have no truck. With the publication of Untouchable, Anand had firmly associated himself with that brand of writers who saw political, social and human causes as genuine impulses for the novel and poetry.7 For Anand literature should be an interpretation of the truth of peoples lives. It should be written from felt experience and not books. It was for this reason that he returned to India briefly in 1929. Being influenced by Gandhi, he came to his ashram in Ahmedabad, where he showed Gandhi drafts of his novel. Gandhi was extremely critical because he claimed there
7

^ Cowasjee, Saros. So Many Freedoms: A Study of the Major Fiction of Mulk Raj Anand , Oxford University Press: New Dehli, 1977

was too much of the Bloomsbury feel to it, on which he was probably right. While in Ahmedabad Anand lived like a disciple and did his share of cleaning the toilets an act seen as defilement for a caste Hindu. In this period Anand revised his book considerably and when Forster read it his retort to those who complained about the dirt in the novel, was that the book seems to me indescribably cleanit has gone straight to the heart of its subject and purified it.8 Though this is his best known and most widely read novel, it was no easy job getting it published in the 1930s. Some 19 publishers had rejected this story for its dirt. In despair Anand was on the brink of giving up when the twentieth publisher accepted the novel on the basis that E M Forster had agreed to write the preface. Anand praised Forster for his support as it was not only unusual for an Indian writer to have his central character be a latrine cleaner; many European writers would not touch a subject like this either. Anand displays compassion for the plight of untouchables but never sentimentality. In many ways the novel represented his thinking beyond the limits of Gandhis idea of untouchables as harijans children of god. For Anand this is far too patronising and it is for this reason that his fictionalised account depicts a debate between a Gandhi-type figure espousing the oneness of humanity and simple living on the land and a poet who poses a modern solution to the problems of untouchability flushing toilets! Anands second novel also illustrated his compassion and concerns for the poor of India. In Coolie he portrays the life of young Munoo, kshatriya by caste but a peasant boy who travels from his mountainous village through north India and eventually finds himself in Bombay. He is an orphan and so is forced to take whatever work he can in order to survive. He works as a servant, in a mine, a factory and as a coolie black men who empty their bowels in the fields. In each of these situations Munoo is subjected to harassment, beatings and financial exploitation at the hands of employers, moneylenders, and his so called betters. But the story is also about the development of a young boy who begins to learn about the world around him and attempt to make some sense of it. This novel was written in 1936 and has a fictionalised account of a Bombay riot, which clearly represented Anands thoughts on those agents who fuelled communalism in their desperate attempts to keep the country divided, but also to keep the poor and workers in their place. So the riot as witnessed by Munoo is deliberately engineered to break a potential strike through the use of communalised tensions between Hindus and Muslims.5 In some ways the failure of progressive and left forces to counter rising communal tensions left Anand feeling that perhaps partition could not be avoided after the growth of the Muslim League and the inability of Nehru to counter the right wing elements within Congress.9

Orwell, George. The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell - My Country Right or Left 19401943, Martin Secker & Warbury Limited: London, 1968, p.216-220
9

Sahitya Akademi Award recipients in English

While in London Anand was conscious not only of colonial racist stereotypes of Indians that were prevalent among some British intellectuals but also the contempt in which they held British workers. A year after he arrived in London the 1926 General Strike took place, and was to have a profound effect upon him. His natural sympathies were with the strikers and their supporters for he found himself comparing the position of the English worker with that of Indians under colonial rule and found British democracy seriously lacking. He believed there to be something rotten in the state of Denmark.7 His outrage at the way the state treated the strikers was only outstripped by his astonishment at the attitudes of the majority of his fellow students who were happy to scab and volunteer to help run trains, trams and tubes. Anand saw this as treachery and he quickly associated himself with a small group of students who refused to be bullied by the others. For his pains he was attacked in Gower Street by fellow students.8 He had no regrets, stating that in life there are some things worth getting beaten up for.10 London was home to many students from India throughout the 1930s and 1940s and Anand soon found himself gravitating towards the group of writers who would meet in peoples living rooms to recite poems and short stories, and above all to discuss the struggle in India and the international crisis with the forward march of fascism in Europe. Anand was invited to represent India on the platform at the World Congress of Writers against Fascism in Madrid in 1935. Anand was acutely aware of the threat fascism represented for writers in Europe and the mortal danger it held for humanity. After seeing the way writers and intellectuals in Europe were organising, on his return to London, along with the writer Sajjad Zaheer, an Indian Communist, he set up the All-India Progressive Writers Association (AIPWA) in 1935. He penned the first draft of their manifesto which with minor adjustments was adopted at the first conference of the association in Lucknow in April 1936. This was a pan-Indian organisation that represented all the major linguistic regions of India and was staunchly secular in outlook and politically committed to the project of an independent united India with social justice and equality. At its height it probably had over 30,000 members writing literature in all the Indian vernaculars. That this literary association was also a social and political movement closely aligned to the Communist Party of India and influenced by Nehruvian nationalism is in no small way to be credited to Anand. Though he never joined the Communist Party, claiming the party would never have been able to tolerate him, he was very much a fellow traveller, aligning himself with the best elements of the left tradition in India. Anands anti-fascist commitment led him to travel to Spain in 1937 to fight with the Republicans in the civil war. He felt it was his duty to show physical support because he was in Europe. He returned to India briefly in 1938 to address the second AIPWA in Calcutta, where he spoke about his experiences in Spain and insisted that writers use their craft as a means of exposing injustice and exploitation.

10

Berry, Margaret (1968-69). Purpose in Mulk Raj Anand's Fiction 5 (1/2). Michigan State University, Asian Studies Center. pp. 8590.

While in Spain he drafted another novel, Across the Blackwaters. This is the middle novel of a trilogy published in 1939. It is based on the experiences of Indian sepoys who are transported to Europe to fight in the First World War. The central character is Lalu, a young Hindu boy who has already broken with strict practices of Hindus by eating at Muslim shops while at home. In Europe we see how the soldiers are treated by their English masters within the army, but Anand also depicts the strict hierarchies among the Indians themselves in terms of caste, class and rank. Lalu not only flouts Indian conventions but in having an on-off flirtation with a French girl he challenges colonial morality under the very noses of the English officers. The novel is full of compassion and humanity as well as humour for the thousands of mostly peasants from the Punjab who died in the trenches of France and Flanders.10 The roots of this story are in Anands childhood. As a boy he had seen hundreds of men go off to Europe from his town and surrounding villages but only a handful returned. This novel achieved such critical acclaim that in 1998 the British Council adapted it as a play to commemorate the eightieth anniversary of the end of the First World War. Anand was pivotal to internationalising the experience of Indian writers to the outside world and he helped to bring an international dimension to the progressive writers movement in India. He is brilliant at satirising the bigotries and orthodoxies of his times, but his novels also celebrate the spirit of human rebellion which embodies all his central characters. Today Salman Rushdie is credited with popularising Indian writing in English. But 50 years earlier Anand had pioneered the writing of Indian literature which was accessible to the English-speaking world. And unlike Rushdie his works were inspired and informed by the lives of real people in unglamorous situations, warts and all. In addition his writings demonstrate a keen desire for political change and social transformation that remained with him throughout his life. The best tribute that readers of this journal could pay Mulk Raj Anand would be to read his novels and be inspired by the dedication and commitment he had.

MULK RAJ ANAD A CREATOR WITH SOCIAL CONCERN

WITH the passing away of Mulk Raj Anand, India has lost one of its great progressive writers. He belonged to a generation of writers committed to the democratic ideals of egalitarianism and social justice - including stalwarts such as Shivram Karanth, Thakazhi Sivasankara Pillai, Gopinath Mohanty, Tarasankar Banerjee, Phaneeshwarnath Renu, Khwaja Ahmed Abbas, Sajjad Zaheer, Ali Sardar Jafri, Kaifi Azmi, Sri Sri, Jayakantan, L.S. Ramamritam, Si.Su. Chellappa, Abdul Rehman Rahi and a host of others - who were inspired by the Gandhian identification with the marginalised and the Marxist principle of the struggle for class justice. These writers, whose time begins with Premchand and Saadat Hassan Manto, and whose lineage can ultimately be traced back to the Bhakti and Sufi poets such as Basava, Kabir, Raidas, Chokha Mela, Gora, Bulle Shah, Baba Farid and Sheikh Abdul Lateef who rebelled against every form of hierarchy on earth, created their own epoch of secular and socialist literature with its own aesthetic of resistance.

Coming from a family of hereditary craftsmen in Peshawar, Anand inherited from his father the pieties of craft and from his mother the rich tradition of mythology. He grew up, as he himself wrote, like most of his contemporaries, "a very superficial, ill-educated young man, without any bearings". After graduating from Punjab University, he won a fellowship to study at the University of London. He obtained his Doctorate in Philosophy from the University of London in 1928, at the age of 23. Exposure to Marxism, a personal encounter with Mahatma Gandhi and a deep study of Gandhian ideals, participation in the anti-fascist

struggle in Spain and involvement in the national struggles for freedom and democracy, strengthened his commitment to socialism and democracy. Anand himself traced his growth as a progressive writer in a conversation with this writer at his Hauz Khas cottage in New Delhi in 1992: "My earlier writings were naive, impetuous and sporadic utterances coming from intense feelings. I found myself embroiled in sad moods, despairs and agonies. My teachers thought that my confusion was the natural expression of adolescence. They did not know that behind the broken lines there were many feelings about my good mother turning into a cruel mother-in-law, my father, a servant of the Sahibs even while being a pseudo-Arya Samajist, my professors, mostly pompous, and senior students, admirable because they were thinking brave thoughts."11 He then reflected on how he met Muhammad Iqbal, the great poet who invited his attention to a question from the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad that inspired his long poem, "Asrar-i-Khudi" (Secrets of the Self). The Upanishad says: "A devotee asked the sage: What may I do with my life? And the sage answers: Ask yourself every day: Who am I? Where have I come from? And where am I going?" He began to ask himself these questions and put down his loose thoughts in his diary, thoughts that hovered around the cruelty based on caste, class and gender he saw around him. He was also inspired by Guru Nanak and Kabir, whose compassion he failed to find in Advaita philosophy. At that time he fell in love with a Muslim girl. However, her parents married her to a railway guard as his third wife. The guard murdered her as he found Anand's love letters in her bag. This deepened his agony. Annie Besant's talk in his college on the freedom struggle, however, gave him hope; so did the tales of Balgangadhar Tilak, Aurobindo Ghosh and Mahatma Gandhi. Annie Besant's chanting of the Rig Vedic hymn on creation moved him deeply. When the Principal was given a punishment transfer for having invited Annie Besant to the college, Anand and his collegemates went on strike and spent a month in jail. His father's ire at the wayward son made him flee home. Again he went to Iqbal, ready to follow in his footsteps. Iqbal dissuaded him from going to Germany; instead he asked him to go to England and meet his friends there for help. He went to London with the Rs.101 Iqbal gave him and an equal amount gifted by his new Principal for having done well in the honours examinations. 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 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

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Mulk Raj Anand: A Creator with Social Concern Frontline, Volume 21 - Issue 21, Oct. 09 - 22, 2004.

superciliously: "O, there can be no novel about the poor! One can only laugh at the Cockneys, like Dickens." This was unnerving. Later in Ireland, he 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 and imperialism. He wrote to Gandhi. Anand reached Ahmedabad in March 1927. Gandhi laughed at Anand's corduroy suit but agreed to look at the manuscript of The 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. The Untouchable went on to become a modern classic and was translated into 20 languages. That was the birth of Mulk Raj Anand the novelist. Anand, the ideologue of the Progressive Literary Movement, was born simultaneously. Sajjad Zaheer, Dr. Ghosh, who taught Bengali at Oxford, Cedric Dover, an Anglo-Indian scholar from Calcutta, and Dr. M.D. Taseer, an Urdu poet, were the first to frame the manifesto heralding the new Movement. The manifesto condemned religious bigotry, casteism and superstitions of all kinds and exhorted writers to confront the dual reality of imperial hegemony and internal social decadence. Since the manifesto attacked fascism as a pseudo-imperialist movement, intellectuals outside India such as Andre Gide, Andre Malraux, Laurence Housman, Ilya Ehrenberg, Pablo Neruda, Ernest Toller and Thomas Mann too welcomed its clear anti-fascist stance. With this the writers from India began to be invited to international conferences of writers. Anand and Sajjad Zaheer attended the World Conference of Intellectuals in 1935 organised by Gide and Malraux and presided over by Gorky. Later Sajjad Zaheer came to India to organise the first Progressive Writers Conference next year; it was chaired by Premchand. Anand went to Spain to join the battle against fascism and participated in the World Conference of Writers in Madrid in 1937. Coming back to India, he organised the Second Conference of Progressive Writers in Calcutta; it was chaired by Tagore. While Anand and his group of writers were attacked by Hindu and Muslim fundamentalists, they found supporters in Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, Tagore, Iqbal, Manik Banerjee, Bibhutibhushan Banerjee, Tarasankar Banerjee, Vallathol Naryana Menon, Thakazhi , Karanth, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Ali Sardar Jafri, Majaz, Ismat Chugtai, Umashankar Joshi, Premchand, Yashpal, Amritlal Nagar and a host of other thinkers and writers from various parts of India. The Indian People's Theatre Association (IPTA), with which he was associated, was instrumental in spreading the message of democracy and socialism, backed by the Communist movment. It was the period of creative turbulence that fired Mulk Raj Anand's imagination: the same that had produced Premchand's Godaan, Thakazhi's Chemmeen,

Gopinath Mohanty's Paraja, K.A. Abbas' Inquilab, Renu's Maila Anchal and Karanth's Chomana Dudi. ANAND brought to fictional life Bakha, his boyhood companion, the untouchable sweeper boy, in The Untouchable. Anand's mother abused Bakha for `polluting' her son when Bakha carried home a bleeding Anand, hurt by a stone. Bakha is reviled by caste Hindus as he cleans latrines; but Anand captures Bakha's pride in his work: he tackles his odious job with a conscientiousness that invests his movement with beauty. The novel was not only a powerful social tract, but a remarkable technical feat as in a single days' action the author builds round his hero a spiritual crisis broad enough to embrace the whole of India. Forster wrote in its introduction: "It has gone straight to the heart of its subject and purified it." Anand continued his interest in social themes with his next few novels dealing with the destiny of the working class in India. Coolie centred around 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. In The Village, inspired by the experience of Anand's mother's family whose land was taken away by the landlord of the village, the novelist explores the state of the poor peasantry under British rule. If 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 mechanisation. Across the Black Waters, 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. Meanwhile, Anand witnessed the bloodbath of the First World War after he joined the India Section of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) along with George Orwell. The Quit India movement had by then been launched. The British government began censoring Anand's reports with their nationalist bias, but Churchill directly intervened and stopped the censorship as Anand was an anti-fascist. Coming back to India, Anand persuaded Nehru to organise the first Asian Writers' Conference, in which 120 writers from across the continent took part. It was attacked as a Communist conference; but the participation of Nehru, S. Radhakrishnan and Rajaji saved the platform. It also inspired the Afro-Asian Writers' Conference the next year, which later inspired writers such as Wole Soyinka and Chinua Achebe. Reflecting on those days, Anand told this writer: "The writers who criticise the progressives don't understand that there is a search for the other in all writing... The Symbolist movement in France, the Imagist movement in poetry in the U.K. and the U.S., the Impressionist movement in painting in Europe, the Leaning Tower school of British poetry led by C.D. Lewis, [W.H.] Auden, [Stephen] Spender and [Louis] McNiece, the Anti-Fascist

Movement in Europe led by writers like Gide and Malraux and, of course, the Russian writers - all these were expressions of a powerful unity emerging among the writers and activists in solidarity with people... . They shared common concerns about human dignity." 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 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. Equally noteworthy was his passion for painting, sculpture and architecture whose best expression was the issues of Marg that he edited for years. He was a fellow of the Lalit Kala Akademi and the Sahitya Akademi, a laureate of the International Peace Prize and a Padmabhushan, honours that never affected his quiet simplicity and dignity as a warmhearted human being. Accepting the Sahitya Akademi Fellowship, he said: "Living in action, as Gandhi taught us to do, means the cultivation of the courage to be human with other humans: it means involvement with all earth's citizens; it entails the acceptance of the heroism of defeat as Jawaharlal showed it because defeat involves persistence in struggle, which makes us more than ourselves, sustains us in compassion, affection and devotion in spite of obstacles... Poetry today has to become courage." This attutide also accounts for his cheerful acceptance of Dalit and feminist writing that he considered the progressive writing of our time. Anand was to Indian people what Anton Chekhov was to Russians: a profound interpreter of their lives, an analyser of their deepest conflicts, a verbaliser of their agonies. Traditionalists criticised him for his departure from tradition; and dogmatic Marxists called him an ambivalent modernist and a liberal humanist. But he believed to the end in people's ability to change themselves and the world. He followed the Gandhian ideals of self-help and selfrenewal, rejected the consumerist civilisation of the West and fought against the forces of

revivalism. Anand was critical of much of what is written in English in India today; he was all for developing a literature of concern, of awareness, of intellectual opposition. He was more concerned with the passionate moment than the rigours of form. His bardic manner, however, finally achieved an effect analogous to a musical rhapsody: familiarity and elevation coalesced in his fiction giving it a `composed matter-of-fact magnificence'. He was different from both his eminent contemporaries, R.K. Narayan, with his urbanity of style, and Raja Rao, with his sacred, confessional vision. For Anand, literature was a force that released men and women from pre-ordained fate. In his hands, metaphysics became an ethics without God as when Gandhi said: "God comes to the poor in the form of bread."

CRITICAL AND CHARACTER ANALYSIS OF COOLIE

Mulk Raj Anands second novel Coolie is written within three months and got it published without much difficulty in 1936, within a year after the publication of Untouchable. It was widely praised by the readers and the critics alike. The popularity of the novel can be judged by the fact that the novel has been translated into more than thirty eight languages. Some call it an epic of misery, others call it an odyssey of a coolie. Anand himself calls it a Whitman poem Passage to India V.S. Pritchett praises it as a political novel of high order. Anand calls this novel a Whitmans poem, A Passage to India not for its poetic quality but for its picaresque nature. It moves from hills to the plain, village to city from the north to the west and again to the north. Anand wants to show in all its varied nuances, that 67exploitation is same everywhere. It is not the religion, race or caste but only cash and class that matter. They all exploit the poor. Munoo, an orphan, nave hill boy of hardly fourteen is compelled to move from place to place against his will in order to earn his living. His father dies of the feudal exploitation and mother of poverty and hunger. An orphan faces domestic exploitation at the hands of his uncle and aunt. They find their nephew, fourteen year old boy, old enough not only to earn his own living but also to support his uncle who works as a chaparasi in one of the banks in the town. They send him to work as a servant in a middle class family in a small town. Here he is exploited by the wife of his master. She treats him like an animal and other members of family treat him like a monkey; an instrument of amusement. In one of such entertaining act in the role of a monkey he bites the daughter of his master. Nathoo Ram, the master considers it as a sexual assault on his daughter and beats him mercilessly. Munoo can no longer bear the cruelty and slips out of the house. Prabha Dayal, an owner of the pickle factory in a neighbouring town feels a strange affinity for this orphan boy and takes him home as an errand boy. Fortunately, the kind hearted wife of Prabha gives him love of his mother. But Ganpat, the partner of his master treats all the workers mercilessly. Ganpat, betrays his partner by spending the clients money extravagantly on drinking and whoring. Prabha gets ruined. The partners treachery not only ruins him but also breaks him completely. He sells out his factory and repays the loan. Munoo works as a coolie not only to earn his living but also to help his master. But Prabha returns to his native place leaving Munoo alone. 68While wandering to get a job, Munoo meets an elephant driver who takes him to Bombay. Here with the help of Hari, a mill worker, he gets a job and shelter. A child of fourteen is compelled to work for eleven hours a day on meagre wages. Here the head foreman, Jimmie Thomas whom labourers call Chimta Sahib makes his life miserable. He treats the factory workers as animals. Ratan, a co-worker protects Munoo from his exploitation but pays the penalty by losing his job. The workers go on strike to protest. But instead of reinstalling Ratan, the management gives them a notice of reducing their working hours. To divert the attention of the agitators they spread therumour that the Hindu child has been kidnapped by a Muslim. The workers enraged with the communal frenzy, spread riot all over the city. Munoo gets hurt in it and cannot return home. In the morning he meets with an

accident. A car knocks him down. The owner of the car, Mrs.Mainwaring takes him to Simla. Munoo recovers soon and starts working as a domestic servant and a Riksha-puller for Mr. Mainwaring. The strenuous work deteriorates his health. The disease turns out to be tuberculosis. Despite all the possible treatments, one day, he dies on the lap of his friend. As the central theme of the novel is exploitation, Anand portrays two classes of characters: the exploiter and the exploited. Munoo is the only major character and a number of minor characters are placed around him in every phase of his life. The characters of British origin in Anands novels can be divided into two categories. In one category there are owners of the capitalist machinery like cotton mills, tea estates and banks. In the other category there is the entire British bureaucracy. In Coolie most of the British characters belong to 69the first category. They are shown as racist. They willfully ostracize the natives. They are paragons of the capitalist exploitation. All the whites support each other in their brutal exploitation of the natives. They do not assimilate with the natives, because they think that they survive only through the brutal and outright exploitation of the ignorant natives. The characters like Thomas, Mr. Little and Mr. White eke out their existence on the exploitation of the natives only. They are the symbols of callousness of capitalists. They are not only unmindful to the problems of the natives but also reticent about them. They look at the Indians as diseaseridden dirty people. Anand is concerned with the capitalist nature of the white characters who belong to the class of oppressors. Edward Burra, a well known critic says, The English occur only as minor characters and are described mostly with an inclination to caricature in fact precisely as they must appear to Indian eyes. It would have been false to Anands purpose to describe them otherwise. (Dhawan ed.82) Anand shows their role in contaminating the Indian society by supporting the evils of the class system. Anand has been criticized for presenting English characters as caricatures. An English critic Alaister Niven in Yoke of Pity says, The cotton Mill episode shows Anands sustained attempt to write off the European characters.(Niven, 61) In the group of Indian minor characters Daya Ram, Babu Nathu Ram, Ganpat, Bibi Uttam Kaur and Sir Todar Mal and his wife belong to the class of exploiters in a restricted sense. They are directly or indirectly responsible for the exploitation of the protagonist. Seth Prabha Dayal, Ratan, Mohan, Hari, a union leader Sauda and two women characters Lakshimi and Parbati all belong to the class of the exploited. Though 70 Munoo is the protagonist, he is a flat passive character. He remains diffident and ineffective till the end. As Riemenscheider points out, Munoo is not the common type of hero we expect to find in a novel. In his opposition to society he is passive while the society is active. Munoo does not build his own life which on the contrary, is built for him. (Riemenscheider 32) Anand has based Munoos character on his childhood playmates who were working in a pickle factory and who accepted their lot with fatalism peculiar to the Indian downtrodden. Munoo represents all the children subjected to tyrannies of social class system for no fault of their own. He is a symbol of child labour victimized by the exploitative capitalist system. He also symbolizes all those coolies who are victims of industrialization, beaten from pillar to post, as S.A.

Khan rightly says, He is one among the millions of coolies tested and formulated by myrid forces of class distinction exploitation and dehumanization. the story of Munoo is quintessentially the story of every exploited individual in India and the pattern of his life is intended to show the pitilessness that lies imbedded in the lives of millions of people who are condemned to lead a life of an unending saga of social depredation. (Khan 30) On account of his being a realistic social novelist, Anand does not make his protagonist a rising force or rebel against the capitalist exploitation but makes him a victim of it. Being a child, he is not even aware of the nature of exploitation; so there is no question of freeing himself from or rebelling against the exploitation. In UntouchableAnand has shown his protagonist as both a victim of and a rebel 71against the caste system but in Coolie the arch character is only a victim of the class system. The want of provisions makes him dream of tasty food to eat, beautiful clothes to wear and of costly toys to play with. He remains innocent throughout the short span of his life. A number of social factors push him into the active mode of life. But, as far as Munoo himself is concerned, he is never, body and soul one with reality. Self realization has been the characteristic feature of almost all Anands heroes. Munoo also asks himself What am I Munoo?... I am Munoo Babu Nathurams servant (68). He accepts his identity as a servant or a slave in the very beginning of his saga of miseries. This cannot be called self realization because his level of consciousness is found to be quite low. Munoo is made aware of the cash nexus but he is never after money. He constantly remains under the fear of losing his job. He becomes a victim of the cash nexus. Prabha can be called a different projection of Munoo. Prabha also had been a coolie earlier but out of sheer hard work he becomes an owner of a pickle factory. Munoo also works hard; but too much work in his early childhood leaves him a victim of tuberculosis, with no hopes of recovery in those days. He is made aware of the social discrimination in the early stage of his life. There must be two types of people in the world: the rich and the poor . The rich are always exploiters and the poor are always exploited. Munoo is exposed to all sorts of mental and physical torture. He is forced to live even among the slum dwellers in subhuman conditions. He becomes the hopeless victim of exploitation everywhere. Munoo never shows reluctance to work hard. He expects sympathy and love which he does not get even after whole heartedly 72sacrificing himself to his employers. He lives under the constant fear of his masters in every phase of his life. In the first phase his uncle and aunt make his life miserable, in the second phase his masters wife makes his life hell and in the third phase his masters partner deprives him of the stable life he wishes to lead. In his Bombay phase a number of exploiting forces make him spiritually die and finally his last master Mrs. Mainwarings acts of exploitations kill him physically. What Premila Paul says in her Thematic study of Mulk Raj Anand is quite right, His aspirations, passionate longings and potentialities go waste before they could find fulfillment. Munoos entire life seems to be a nightmare. Poverty, hunger and exploitation seem to to him from his parents. A few like Prabha Dayals wife lend him a helping hand in his fight for

survival and moments of happiness. But others like Nathu Rams wife Uttam Kaur give him only packs of miseries and sorrow. S. A. Khan says, The story of Munoo is the story of unending pain relieved only by some imperfect glimpses of happiness . The glimpses of happiness are given only by those who tested the bitterness of indigence. Thus Anand makes his character voice his own consciousness and touches upon the conscience of the reader. Among the Indian characters Daya Ram is the first person responsible for Munoos miseries. When Munoos father loses his land, being the younger brother, he indirectly becomes the victim of the feudal exploitation. Later he is brought up by his brother and sister-inlaw. But he forgets it as soon as he gets married. The greed for money compels him to exploit his fourteen year old nephew. He enjoys the monthly wages of his nephew but does not love or sympathizes with him. Babu Nathu Ram is the second character responsible for the miseries of Munoo. He is a typical lower middle class person who has neither self respect nor any voice of his own. Henpecked Nathu Ram backs his wife in her merciless treatment to Munoo. Biwi Uttam Kaur or Biwiji, exploits her servant to show her class superiority. She does not allow Munoo to play with her children. Under the false superiority complex Biwi Uttam Kaur makes Munoos life a hell. She is portrayed a stern, snobbish Hindu orthodox woman bound by the innumerable customs and taboos. Ganpat is another wicked character responsible for Munoos miserable condition in the third phase of Munoos life. Right from the beginning, he shows his cruel nature by abusing Munoo as Seducer of his daughter. By often referring to him as the goat face, Anand shows his inhuman nature. Seth Prabha Dayal, one of a few well wishers of Munoo can be called a possible projection of Munoo in other circumstances. He comes to city from hills as Munoo does and makes his fortune through hard work. He can be called the only Gandhian character in the novel. He does not forget that he had been a coolie in the past. He shows love for his servants. But his excessive humility ruins his career. He gets bankrupt due to his partners deceitful conduct. But he sells out his property and repays all the debts. Ratan can be called a significant character of the Bombay phase. In spite of his being a wrestler He is a very kind hearted person. Though he works as a coolie he does not lose his self respect. He helps those who are exploited by the society. He falls short of the moral standards set by employers. He dares to raise his hand against the foreman and the moneylenders who exploit the coolies. In Ratan we find Anands hope for the future. Through his bravery, the seeds of protest are sown in the minds of workers. Through his leadership he inspires his co-workers. As Mr. W. P. England belongs to an ordinary family he has not the sense of alienation for the natives of India. Being an honest man, he feels that he should make clean breast of his actual family background and lower education. But like other white characters he has to show colonial superiority through his behaviour.

Jimmie Thomas is an Englishman who symbolizes the colonial exploitation. He is a wicked and repulsive character. Through this character Anand has shown that the people like Jimmie Thomas exploit the Indians due to their colonial power but when wrestlers like Ratan challenge them they show their timidity. It is nonetheless, the true nature of English characters. But the wicked Thomas takes revenge upon Ratan by terminating his services in the nick of time. His tyranny brings all the workers and the factory in trouble and resultantly they go on strike due to his exploitation. He exploits the worker not only on the basis of his power as a government agent but also by his own vested coteries of exploitation in the shape of his private ownership of huts and money lending business. Mrs. Mainwaring is an Anglo-Indian lady who comes in the last phase of Munoos life. Anand has severely criticized this character. Saros Cowasjee in his Coolie: An Assessment observes, ...Anand gets so involved pillorying the Anglo-Indian woman that he loses sight of his hero. He gives some five pages to sketching her background and her somewhat shady present. Most of Anands characters are modelled after his acquaintances. This character seems to be an attempt of Anand to express his feelings against women similar to her. Mrs. Mainwaring is a caricature of an Anglo-Indian lady split between two cultures. She suffers from inferiority complex about her origin. She is torn between the fear of sin and fascination for sex. This contradiction turns her nature into a strange perversity. She treats Munoo with utmost care. But Anand gives a hint, by her strange attraction towards Munoo, as a boy, that she exploits Munoo sexually. By showing her past, which was full of her longing for sex and love, Anand makes us suspect that she arouses Munoos passion. No doubt, the character of Mrs Mainwaring is an authentic portrayal. But as Saros Cowasjee says, ...the novel does not substantiate the whore the author has shown her to be. Among Indian women characters, Gujri and Biwi Uttam Kour are shown exploiting Munoo. But in later phases some women give him mental and spiritual solace. Parbati takes care of him like his mother. Her sympathetic words link her with Munoos mother. Haris wife Lakshimi understands Munoos torments when she lulls him to sleep with the incantation. We belong to suffering! We belong to suffering! My love! Saros Cowasjee finds fitting conclusion of the novel in her incantation We belong to suffering! We belong to suffering. Anand does not want to present merely a gloomy picture of a coolie in the capitalistic society but he wishes to arouse the conscience of humanity against the ruthless exploitation of the downtrodden. Through the tragedy of Munoo he touches upon the sublime areas of human experience. Coolie has been criticized by the Indian critics as a novel of propaganda. Paul Varghese calls it a blatant propaganda. S.C. Harrer also calls it downright propaganda. In his essay The Fire and the Offerings he observes, Coolie demonstrates an early tendency in Anand to present life in terms of proletarian experience and a commentary on the experience, and these two aspects are artificially separated at certain points of authorial intrusion or didactic characterization because of the intellectual limitation of the central character

CONLUSION
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 and are considered important primarily for the social statement that they make , Mulk Raj Anand is considered to be a doyen of Anglo-Indian literature. With him India has received an unceasing champion of the cause of poor and lowly whose writings arrest the critical attention of the learned people towards the inhumane, hatred and unjustified conditions of downtrodden and deprived of Indian society. His humanitarian approach and altruistic attitude have always impelled him to use his mind and art for the sake of social welfare. With his literary power and perspectives he has tried his best to spring up the healthy human values and radical social transformation in our human society in which the haves and have nots both can enjoy happily the bliss of human life on the same footings and fraternity peace, love and justice. Anand attacks on political as well as social and economic institutions, are carried out mainly on behalf of India's poor, in the effort of to destroy forces inimical to their development and to build a world of freedom and equality where human potential can flourish. His thought replete with revolutionary gusto and fervor is well represented by his second novel Coolie. While his first novel Untouchable deals with age-old ghastly evils of untouchability, which has deep roots in the Hindu hierarchy, his this one Coolie is based upon the aspect of class struggle, social injustice and psychological conflict of the poor. It has also the consummation of various themes and theories like denial of right to happiness to a simple 'landless orphan',' exploitation of underprivileged', 'the impact of capitalism', 'industrialism and colonialism', 'religious and political hypocrisy of Indian society'. At the same time, 'unjust social system', social and sexual degradation of human mind', and 'relationship of the Indian and the British in pre-Independence days', 'man-woman relationship', tension and trauma', hateful and harmful relationship between Hindu and Muslim' too have been analyzed in sociological perspectives. Theoretically, Coolie is the epic of the poor India that provides many pieces of information and items nowhere dealt before. Its appeal is so much innate, humane potential and wide extensive that has designed it purposive to be translated into more than 38 languages of the world. It has earned for Anand a global reputation as one of the prolific and prominent English novelists. Its conclusive contents and basic social ideas that try to improve the health of our Indian society make it an epic of suffering Coolie has several characters; male and female. Munoo is the main character of this novel. With Munoo there are other characters like Dayaram, Babu Nathoo Ram, Ganpat, Dr. Prem Chand, Seth Prabh Dayal, Jimmie Thomas, Mrs. Mainwaring, Lakshmi, Harihar, the Todar Muls, and Ratan and so on. Out of these characters some are the sufferers and other are the persons who make them suffer anyhow. We can show the theme of suffering through the following characters in the novel Coolie. Synopsis: The `Coolie` by `Mulk raj Anand` gives a chilling picture of a down stepped boy Munno who

at his early stage gets into obscurity of his own existence. He could feel the itch of an orphan and Anand could rightly give a heart throbbing description of his mental state and his all activities in a unique way. This book is really touchy for an emotional person. The book holds oneself to the way the life of Munno takes on from his home in village to a role as a servant in a house, likewise as a factory worker and eventually as a rickshaw driver. Finally he dies by tuberculosis. There is enough of such human existence in and around the society but under the pressure of survival of fittest these persons are ignored everyday. This book makes the people to think for a while about their lives who just seek only a decent living. Today, people may find Anand`s razor-sharp realism of Coolie to be brusque, but the fact is that the novel still makes the reader twist in discomfort with its naked realism. Coolie is a great novel of pre-independence India that has chivalrously stood the test of time. One clearly remembers the protagonist`s agony on being denied the right to answer nature`s call. That one scene alone makes for timeless reading.