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Mulk
Raj Anand
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It is hard to believe that the son of a regimental head clerk born in Peshawar on 12 December 1905, should today be one of the best-known Indians in his country, a prolific writer who has been the adviser of statesmen (and one stateswoman), a pioneer in art criticism, a campaigner for peace, and a scion of Bloomsbury. These are improbable combinations, but they are met in the person of Mulk Raj Anand. Across the Black Waters (a transliterated phrase to suggest ‘abroad’) was begun in 1937 and first published in 1940. Two years ago when Mulk was last in Britain he persuaded me to drive him to the small Buckinghamshire community of Chinnor where we traced an unbecoming terraced house in which he had written large parts of the novel. It was an improbable place in which to conceive the front-line terrors which confront Lalu and his fellow soldiers or the bewildered fatalism with which so many of them go to their deaths. Across the Black Waters is the only Indian novel set in the First World War, but it reeks too of Anand’s recent experiences in the Spanish Civil War. Indeed, the first draft of much of it was written in Madrid and Valencia. The novel which the Mán Melá Theatre Company is dramatising now is the second part of a trilogy in which Lalu is the central character throughout. The other books are The Village (1939) and The Sword and the Sickle (1942). Major works by Anand also include Untouchable, which has been continuously in print since it was first published in 1935 at the behest of E.M. Forster, whose preface always accompanies it; Coolie (1936); Private Life of an Indian Prince (1953); and a sequence of autobiographical novels upon which he is still working in his ninety-third year. He has written many short stories and essays, made films and broadcasts, and been an outspoken advocate of liberal causes. It is fifty years since Anand lived in Britain, though he did so for the best part of two decades before that, initially as a philosophy student but afterwards working at the Hogarth Press with Leonard and Virginia Woolf. He was later employed by the BBC, and as I write I have before me a photograph taken in a studio there in the 1940s where he sits beside T.S. Eliot, George Orwell and William Empson among others. It is extraordinary that this great man, who visited D.H Lawrence shortly before he died, who knew every intellectual in London in the ‘30s and ‘40s, and who corresponded with politicians all round the world, should today be hardly remembered in this country. Mán Melá is doing a great service by telling younger people - some of them very young, who are coming to a play for the first time - something about the father figure of modern Indian literature in English. Without Anand there might be no Salman Rushdie, Vikram Seth or Arundhati Roy today. And without Across the Black Waters there would be no imagined re-creation of the lives of Indian sepoys in the trenches of Flanders. We need to know their story - and we do so because of a great storyteller.
ALASTAIR NIVEN |
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Click here for information on Across the Black Waters Novel about Indian soldiers on the Western Front |
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Last updated: 30 January 2001 - C. Goffin |
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