Classic Mulk Raj Anand

by Mulk Raj Anand

  Chapters 3 and 4, depicting Munoo’s experiences in Daulatpur and Bombay respectively, constitute the bulk of the novel and show Anand at his angriest. Laughter is kept to the minimum, and the comic irony of the previous chapter gives way to caustic irony. Having fled from his mistress’s wrath, Munoo has found a home with Prabha Dyal who, along with Ganpat, has come to own a pickle factory in Daulatpur. At the start, things seem to go well for Munoo, despite the long hours and gruelling conditions of work. Prabha, himself once a coolie, understands the boy’s plight, and he and his wife consider adopting him as their son.

  In the preceding chapter, the relationship of master and servant was explored. Anand censures all such relationships, for they are unhealthy and meanly submissive. He now goes on to show the relationship between equals, and there are none more equal than the poor. The relationship between Prabha (at heart a coolie), Munoo and the other factory employees (all hillmen) is one of comradeship: their common humanity is all they possess. At the other end of the scale we have Ganpat (the frustrated son of a well-to-do broker), the Todar Mals (essentially Nathoo Rams become successful), and the police—more a symbol of British oppression than British justice. Their world is a world of hysteria, one devoid of restraint and self-respect. When Prabha goes bankrupt on being cheated by his partner, his creditors beleaguer him. They yell, shout abuse and fight among themselves for what little might still be had from auctioning the property, and then come together and fall mercilessly upon their victim. The scene is almost unbearable in its violence.

  Though Anand’s sympathies lie with the poor, it would be an over-simplification to presume that all virtue is embodied in them and that the rich are irredeemably bad. The competition that Munoo faces at the Grain Market after Prabha’s insolvency is a case in point. In the night the coolies fight among themselves for a spot of ground to lay their naked bodies to rest; in the morning they shove and push each other in a mad rush to carry heavy burdens on their backs. But Anand makes it known that the evils one sees in the poor are the direct result of capitalistic exploitation and of the indifference of the British towards millions of their subjects. The same cannot be said of the rich—their greed is needless. There is a lot of difference between Prabha’s creditors fighting among themselves to recover whatever they can and the starving coolies vying with each other to earn a few annas to keep body and soul together.

  The Bombay chapter offers some unforgettable scenes such as the Hindu–Muslim riots; it also reinforces what we have witnessed earlier. The life and hardship of the poor remain the same; the change is one of scale mostly: the larger the city, the more ruthless the exploitation and the greater the human misery. The indigenous pickle factory has now its counterpart in the Sir George White Cotton Mills, where the working conditions are even more gruelling; the world of the poor remains basically one of comradeship, whilst that of the rich is still one of greed and hysteria. The occasional destitutes to be seen on the streets of Daulatpur have now been replaced by a vast concourse of pavement dwellers, and Anand’s description of them makes some of the most poignant reading in the book. Note how deftly and laconically they are etched: ‘... in a corner a coolie lay huddled, pillowing his head on his arm, shrinking into himself as if he were afraid to occupy too much space’, ‘an emaciated man, the bones of whose skeleton were locked in a paralytic knot’, and ‘a bare body rolling in anguish and slapping itself on the knees to the accompaniment of foul curses’. But perhaps the most agonizing picture of all is offered when the farmhand Hari, along with his family and Munoo, reach a clearing which surprisingly has not been occupied. As they stand wondering, a half-naked woman speaks to them between sobs:

  ‘My husband died there last night!’

  ‘He has attained the release,’ said Hari. ‘We will rest in his place.’

  Death has ceased to frighten the poor, it is life that is a threat. Anand’s rustics, like those of Wordsworth and Hardy, reveal a solemn dignity born out of long suffering. Their stoical acceptance of fate is not mere fatalism, but wisdom acquired through long experience.

  Two of Anand’s most sympathetic critics—Jack Lindsay and C.D. Narasimhaiah—feel that the Simla chapter is not an organic part of the total pattern and could be dispensed with. I do not agree with this view. It was right of Anand to retrieve his hero from the horrors of Bombay to help him regain his identity before he coughs his lungs out pulling his mistress’s rickshaw. It is the correct finale to the concerto—the boy who had come from the hills to work and see the world goes back to the hills to die. What is wrong, if anything, is that Anand gets so involved in pillorying the Anglo-Indian woman that he occasionally loses sight of his hero.

  The mountains and the valleys revive in Munoo the memories of his village, and this section contains some of Anand’s best descriptions of nature. Like the Anglo-Indian writer Philip Mason, Anand is a painter of nature in all its moods and has a remarkable flair for evoking the smells and colours of India. The steep hills overgrown with rich green foliage, the streams and the waterfalls, the clouds rolling swiftly across the sky, the crisp cool air, all stand in sharp contrast to the heat and humidity of Bombay. Munoo responds to the beauty around him as he pulls his mistress’s rickshaw along the Mall and sees the world of the upper echelons of society. He wishes he could belong to that class. His mistress is kind to him, and her coquetry fires his adolescent passions till he crumples at her feet in an orgy of tears and kisses. Sexual urges—half-expressed, half-understood—had tormented him from the very beginning, and like much else in his life they never saw fulfilment. The body of Nathoo Ram’s daughter, Sheila, outlined in her wet garments, had stirred his first inklings of sensuality; later the warmth of Parbati’s body, as he nestled against her, aroused a confusion of the feelings of both a son and a lover. Much the same feelings prevailed when he returned from a prostitute’s salon in Bombay to writhe in pent-up passions in the arms of Hari’s wife, who understood the boy’s torments and lulled him to sleep with the incantation, ‘We belong to suffering! We belong to suffering! My love!’ These lines could have been a fitting conclusion to the novel, though the lines Anand has chosen are no less beautiful: ‘But in the early hours of one unreal white night he passed away—the tide of his life having reached back to the deeps.’

  Private Life of an Indian Prince:

  The last of Anand’s novels to be first published in Britain, Private Life of an Indian Prince (1953) is also the author’s most profound. Though a knowledge of the political background is not essential to the appreciation of this work, it does help to explain certain gestures and actions of the Prince. On the surface of it, Maharaja Ashok Kumar’s bid for independence might seem the act of a lunatic, but not so if one bears in mind what the British government had led the princes to believe for nearly a century. Her Majesty Queen Victoria, in 1858, gave her celebrated pledge to ‘respect the rights, dignity, and honour of the native Princes as our own’. His Majesty King George V reaffirmed this promise in the most uncompromising words: ‘Ever to maintain the privileges, rights, and dignities of the Indian Princes, who may rest assured that this pledge is inviolate and inviolable.’ Representatives of the Crown in subsequent years repeated these promises, but when Independence came to India and Pakistan in 1947, all that the princes got were advice and admonitions. The princes, whose dynasties had faithfully stood behind the Crown through two world wars and had fought the nationalists at home to defend the British Raj, regarded this as an arrant breach of trust. The British government, on their part, argued that their pledges to the princes rested on Paramountcy (on the fact of their supremacy throughout India), and not merely on treaties and assurances. With their withdrawal from the rest of India, Paramountcy automatically lapsed and they were thus no longer in a position to offer protection to the princes. However, there was an alternative for the princes: they could unilaterally declare independence if they wished. Paramountcy would not be transferred to any successor government, they were assured. But this was small comfort
to most of them. Lord Mountbatten, then Viceroy and Governor-General of India, urged the princes to forget about independence and to accede to either India or Pakistan. The majority of them reluctantly took the advice. By the date set for an independent India, all but three princes (Kashmir, Hyderabad and Junagadh) had signed the Instrument of Accession. Private Life of an Indian Prince is about a fourth (the ruler of Sham Pur—a fictitious one) who holds out against the Union and is finally coerced into joining on the grounds that his administration has failed and has led to chaos in the state.

  After a stay of twenty-five years in England, Anand returned to India in 1946 to witness the country win independence and the 500-odd princely states merge into the Indian Union. In 1948, he wrote Private Life of an Indian Prince, not so much to show the demise of the princely order as to provide therapy for his own illness (Anand had suffered a nervous breakdown over an affair with a hill-woman and had been advised to write the anguish out of his system). Of course, his knowledge of the princes and their administration was there to give his fictional episodes the detail and immediacy of a painfully reconstructed past. He had observed the princes carefully, not only as people interesting in their own right but also because of their impact on the common man. Above all, there was, as Anand puts it,

  My knowledge of Indian life at various levels [which] had always convinced me that I should do a comedie humaine. In this the poor, the lowly and the untouchables were only one kind of outcastes. The middle sections and the nabobs and rajas were also to be included as a species of untouchables. Unfortunately, there has not been time to show the poor-rich of our country, who deserve pity more than contempt.

  The material he required was all there. In his handling of it, he was influenced by Tolstoy and Dostoevsky—his favourite reading. One can also detect some influence of Andre Malraux’s Man’s Fate (1933), which, says Anand, ‘was very much in my mind for ten years before I wrote Private Life’.

  Maharaja Ashok Kumar (better known as Vicky) chooses to assert complete independence for his small kingdom of Sham Pur rather than join the Indian Union. A febrile romantic who has inherited more of the vices than the virtues of his ancestors, he is encouraged in his histrionics by his nymphomaniac mistress, Ganga Dasi, a powerful and illiterate hill-woman whose spell holds him in a grip beyond all counsel. His prospects of success for an independent Sham Pur are slim to begin with, and these quickly vanish when he starts exacting huge fees from his starving peasantry to feed his mistress’s greed. This brings him into a dangerous confrontation with his subjects at a most inopportune time. If he meets Ganga’s challenge with hysterical tears, he meets the political challenge from his people and the Government of India with self-deluding lies. Needless to say, he loses both contests: his mistress elopes with his Political Secretary, and the Indian States Department forces him to sign the Instrument of Accession. Exiled in London, he seduces a shop girl with princely finesse. But he cannot forget his mistress and has her paramour murdered only to end up in a madhouse from the shock of what he has done.

  Private Life of an Indian Prince, consisting of three parts and an epilogue, is expertly designed. Anand opens the story with a public scandal and immediately captures the reader’s attention. Vicky has taken Bunti Russell to the ravines ‘for the obvious purpose’, and there is as much tension in the Russell household as there is in the Maharaja’s lodge. ‘I have found no evidence of rape, but there has been an attempt at penetration,’ announces the English doctor, much to the relief of the Prince’s retinue. There is a scuffle with Bunti Russell’s father, which the Prince wins with the aid of his ADC. But how dare a commoner lay hands on the sacred person of the Maharaja? Regal rage is now at its height, and so continuous is the monologue and so persuasive the campaign of denunciation that even the keen-witted and sceptical Dr Hari Shankar (the narrator) is inveigled into accepting the Prince’s plan to lodge an official complaint with the Deputy Commissioner of Simla. But the Deputy Commissioner excuses himself from seeing His Highness, and on the trip back Vicky sees the need for a drastic remedy:

  As we drove away from the Deputy Commissioner’s bungalow it impressed itself upon His Highness, in the quiet and cool of the evening, that things had gone very wrong, that he would have to do something very drastic to mend the situation into which he had got himself. For he asked his rickshaw coolies to come abreast of the rickshaw in which I was riding and told me, with more pathos than he had brought to his voice before in uttering the same truth, ‘I am a rat in a hole.’

  Anand is a master of the mock-heroic and the anticlimax. The passage just quoted reveals two of his chief characteristics: first, his sense of pity, not diffused or clotted, but tempered with an irony which bites an incident into the memory; second, his lyrical gift, which shows its full brightness when the author settles down to a clinical analysis of Vicky’s character.

  Having secured the reader’s attention, Anand goes on to arouse his curiosity. What is Vicky doing in Simla when the fate of his state is in the balance? What are conditions like back home? Who is Ganga Dasi from whose grip the Prince cannot free himself? All this information Anand divulges to the reader during the royal party’s return to the state, a journey which has become necessary because of the scandal, the exhortations of the prime minister, and the compulsions of Vicky’s mistress. Had Anand opened his novel with the tangled history of the Prince’s life and that of his state, the casual reader might have lost interest in the story. Anand wisely defers it till the homeward journey begins.

  Part Two is almost twice as long as the other three sections taken together. Simla with its scandals was a paradise compared to what Vicky has to face in Sham Pur. There are three major forces working against him. The first is Ganga, whose emotional hold he understands as acutely as his inability to free himself from it. The second is the Congress government in Delhi, actively encouraging upheavals in the state so as to force him into signing the Instrument of Accession. The third is the people of Sham Pur, the most powerful yet invisible actors in this drama, lying in wait to ambush the decadent Prince and wipe out the feudal oligarchy that has preyed upon them.

  Vicky meets the dual challenge from his people and from the government of the day with foolish boasts and ill-conceived bravado. So out of touch is he with reality that he arranges army manoeuvres near the Indian border, which he himself supervises in the uniform of an Honorary Major-General. It impresses no one but angers the peasants when his jeeps and tanks roll over their crops. He organizes a shoot for Mr Peter Watkins (nearly the Ambassador!) of the American embassy in Delhi in the futile hope of securing American intervention. The whole thing is an unrelieved fiasco (his mistress gets a chance to sleep with the journalist Kurt Landauer), and Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, Union minister for states, becomes alarmed and orders Vicky to report immediately to Delhi.

  The scene that follows is perhaps the best in the novel. In Delhi, Vicky is asked to wait indefinitely, and that alone brings down his pride by several notches. Finally an interview is granted at five o’clock on a grey dawn. The minister, with a scowl, addresses Vicky as Raja (a title inferior by one degree), and he is soon reduced to less than his normal size. He is scolded like a schoolboy for maladministration, ruthless suppression and corruption, and before he has had a chance to say one-tenth of the things he had rehearsed over the period of waiting in Delhi, he has signed on the dotted line and the destiny of Sham Pur has mingled with that of the Indian Union. There is virtually no exaggeration in Anand’s epigrammatic summary: ‘Sardar Vallabhbhai (Wishmarck) Patel growled, like a big angry bull, twice or thrice from the rostrum in Delhi. And most of the sons of Suns and Moons fell into line as children of the earth.’2

  Anand could have finished his novel here. It would have been as easy to have Vicky taken to a lunatic asylum now as later. Part Three and the epilogue deal with Vicky’s brief exile in London and his mental collapse, and here Anand does his utmost to impose upon the situation what he terms the ‘Yoke of Pity—[the] compassion
ate understanding of the dignity of weakness, of even negative, broken-down people who struggle so hard to survive at some human level, and sometimes surpass themselves by doing things least expected of them, such as the ultimate love of Vicky for Ganga Dasi, for whom he has her paramour murdered and ends up by losing his mind’.

  To prevent the novel from lapsing into sentimentality, Anand introduced the amusing episode of Vicky seducing the shop girl, June Withers. This the Prince achieves with consummate skill, and even his dim-witted ADC shows gumption by announcing Vicky’s title to the beholders just as Vicky is about to panic. The campaign to seduce June Withers is better conducted than the one to preserve his state. On one flank June is besieged by temptations such as a Rolls-Royce, cocktails, dresses, dinners; on the other by the Prince’s manoeuvres, which range from reading her palm to intimate confessions about his private life. But his passion for Ganga is genuine, and June cannot replace her. His last fling and his sudden collapse are like a brilliant clinical study of ‘some exotic, tropical insect which ends its days under a scientist’s microscope’.