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Mulk Raj Anand – World Peace Movement Mulk Raj Anand has been connected with the World Peace Movement since its beginnings in 1948 at a meeting of world intellectuals. He has often expressed the belief that he would be very much less a writer if he didn’t devote himself almost 90% to the quest for Peace. His conditioning, as it were, goes back considerably before 1948 however. From India, he knew the doctrine of non-violence as preached by Gandhi, and although he never accepted Gandhian non violence in its entirety – for instance in the war against Hitler and not in the Bangladesh War of 1972 –the Mahatmas philosophy in this regard has remained in his view a goal for all of mankind, collectively and individually. From Europe and America he was familiar with the anti war literature of the 20s and 30s. In collaboration with other Indian Writers he helped organise the first All India Progressive Writers Conference in Lucknow in 1936. The essence of their manifesto was the inclusion of social and political cause in the inspiration behind their fictions and facts. By the end of the mid thirties his feelings, combined with the struggle against British Imperialism with which he was already involved, led him to join the fight against fascism. In London in 1936 he was on the platform of the Anti Fascist Writers Conference, alongside such writers as Malraux. His wish to support the Spanish literal cause sent him to Spain in 1937 for another conference with Stephen Spender, Pablo Neruda, Ernest Hemingaw and others. He returned to India in 1945 and worked with Nehru in The Indian Freedom Movement. About that time he explains: “To me the idea of political freedom in India was always only a stepping stone towards that larger freedom of the whole world. As Gandhi used to say, “Let all the winds of the world blow in; let us open our doors and windows and only see that we are not swept off our feet by these winds.” There is so much knowledge…coming from all parts of the world that so much more interchange, a new consciousness, must take place…this means that prejudices against other ways of thought must stop. My idea of co-existence is co-discovery.” He returned to England in 1948 where he received the invitation to attend that first conference of intellectuals in Warsaw, out of which was born the World Peace Movement…for which he was Nehru’s representative. In 1952 he received the International Peace Award and became for a time the head of the cultural division of the World Peace Council. One of the projects he worked on was a syllabus for Education in the world. At the time an increasing need was expressed by intellectuals like Linus Pauling, Desmond Bernal and Bertrand Russell to campaign against armaments and to find a way to avoid war. A two yer effort resulted in the Stockholm Appeal against the Bomb. Mulk also worked on behalf of the unliberated African people and helped assure the inclusion of the solidarity of Asian and African nations among the goals of the peace movement. In face the development of Asian-African friendship was important to him and at Nehru’s request he organised the Asian African Writers Conference in Delhi in 1956 which in 1958 at Tashkent became the Afro-Asian Writers Conference….He always felt that without national liberation there could be no peace, an emphasis which was to be expected given the long struggle of his own country for independence. Politics and literature were in certain respects inextricable for him and he has said many time, in fact, that to be an Indian is to be political. Anand’s long and heartfelt commitment to the causes of peace and freedom has been intimately bound up with his creativity and with his identity as a novelist and short story writer and his travels and efforts on behalf of the peace movement have consistently alternated and even gone on simultaneously with the writing of fiction. Although Anand always understood full well that books do not change life his belief is that they deepen and intensify awareness and that participation in the arts is a way of promoting understanding among nations. His social vision resulted and became inseparable from his formulation of an artistic theory… believing art to be revolutionary in its capacity to change life. He saw the artist as one who also had responsibilities as a citizen.. He wrote that a writer should stand as an interpreter of one human soul to another and by his particular talent for revealing the unity in diversity of human nature, create real bonds of sympathy between nation and nation, one people and another and in fact between every genuine layer of life seeking to understand another. In other words, the novelist’s creative effort is more likely to be effective in softening men’s hearts than sermons of lectures… that all art, in fact, is able to sensitise human beings and ultimately enhance the quality of life…. Marilyn Stafford |