Men That Keep Attention: Life and Contribution of Mulk Raj Anand


                   The pioneer of Indian English literature, Mulk Raj Anand was born in a Hindu Family of Kshatriyas on 12Dei, 1905 in Peshawar, the central city of Northeast Frontier province, now in Pakistan. His ‘mother’s gift of storytelling’ enriched him early from his life. He along with R.K. Narayana and Raja Rao established Indian novel in the gamut of Indian and world literature. Read More Indian English

Mulk Raj Anand was the master of storyteller of the downtrodden and of the touchable who suffer from the unending story of exploitation. He carves out epics from the real Indian life of the pre-Independence period. Read More Men That Keep Attention He looked Indian life fully in the face with unblinking and yielding eyes, challenged it, fought with the audacity and boldness of a true Indian. Read More Indian English He was sophisticated and cosmopolitan in his outlook and philosophy of life, but was impatient of transcendentalism and skeptical of religion. His realistic novels Angry at Injustice, Satirical yet warm reveal the great Indian generosity of heart and great sympathy whit the unfortunate and anger against towards the forces, which made then helpless.

Mulk Raj Anand enjoys the reputation of being a pioneer novelist because of a corpus of creative fiction of sufficient bulk and quality besides novels and short stories, he has written a number of books on art, paintings and literature.

Mulk Raj Anand
Anand became an exciting name with his early novels Untouchable, Coolie and Two leaves and Bud in which he started the new trend of realism and social protest in Indian English fiction.  In his novels, he portrays the doomed life of the downtrodden and the oppressed. Read More Men That Keep Attention  His protagonists a sweeper, a coolie, a peasant-are all victims of exploitation, class-hatred, race-hatred and inhuman cruelty. Over the years, Anand has become a vigorous champion of the oppressed and the clown trodden. Read More Indian English

Untouchable, a powerful novel, can be regarded as quintessential Anand since it Projects most of the characteristic concerns and fundamental issues of life. The main theme of the novel is untouchable as a problem in Hindu society. 

Anand wrote a trilogy, a series of three novels dealing with the same protagonist called Lal Sing. The novels were entitled The village Across Blank Waters and The Sword and The Sickle. Read More Men That Keep Attention  He Later published Seven Summers’s, the first of a series of seven novels which Anand planned to write as a kind of autobiography in seven parts, corresponding to the seven stages of a man’s life as described by Shakespeare in his play As You like It. Morning Face the second of seven novels in the series, was published in 1968 and received the shanty Academy Award for 1971. Read More Indian English This has been followed by Confession of a Lover, Babble, Little plays of Mahatma Gandhi and Nine Moods of Bharata.

Mulk Raj Anand was the only surviving member of the great triumvirate of Indian Writing in English. The other two are R.K. Narayana of Malgudi days and Raja Rao of Kanthapura. Read More Indian English  While the entire world was palming to celebrate the birth centenary of the father of Indian English literature on 12th Dec, 2005, the news of his death came on as a thunder bolt.


Ref: 1. History of English Literature- Albert,      
     2. The Concise Cambridge History of English Literature
      3. Microsoft Students’ Encarta               

1 comment:

Drop any query, suggestion or comment here.

Buy My Books

Buy My Books
Objective Questions from English Literature

Recent Posts