Nilanjana S Roy: The seven ages of Mulk Raj Anand

SPEAKING VOLUMES

"And one man in his time plays many parts" goes a line from the "Seven Ages of Man" speech in Shakespeare's As You Like It. Perhaps this is what the late Mulk Raj Anand had in mind when he decided to pen his autobiography in seven stages.

He covered only three""technically, the infant, the schoolboy and the lover""before his saga appeared to run out of steam.

The last volume, The Bubble, appeared in 1984: as with the previous two, Mulk Raj Anand felt compelled to cloak even this most factual of undertakings in a thin fictional cloak.

His protagonist throughout the saga was called Krishan Chander Azad, though he admitted that Azad was just an alter ego.

The image most of us have of the late author, who died last week at the age of 99, isn't far removed from those portraits of national leaders, shrouded in garlands of dead marigolds, that used to hang on our walls in more innocent decades.

We see Mulk Raj Anand as "Uncle Mulk", the "father of Indian writing in English", as the "doyen of Indian literature", the man who started a magazine of the calibre of Marg, who gave encouragement to the likes of Mahasweta Debi.

The portrait of him that will probably survive is the one of the famous author in the twilight of his years, seated formally on a chair with manuscripts and books heaped behind, his black mongrel sleeping peacefully alongside in the bizarre but gracious crumbling Bombay mansion where he lived.

Mulk Raj Anand was, by all accounts, generous with his time. He believed in the fight for a better India that began with the freedom movement, he believed strongly that writers had a duty to speak out against oppression of all kinds (as he had), and he made this clear well into his nineties.

When Taslima Nasreen came under fire, Mulk Raj Anand wrote an open letter to Frontline defending her freedom to write. It wasn't the quality of her prose that was important to him so much as the passion of her beliefs and the unfairness of her would-be censors: these things he understood instinctively.

It's been almost a week since his rain-swept cremation. His death has returned me to books I read with intense curiosity at an earlier stage but then neglected for more contemporary enticements.

Mulk Raj Anand began writing The Untouchable, an ambitious critique of the caste system that followed Bakha the sweeper through a day in his life, when he was still in his twenties. He had grown up in cantonments; he had studied at Khalsa College between 1921 and 1924, where a speech by Annie Besant ignited a spark of political passion in his mind.

In 1924, he ran away when his parents decided to arrange a marriage for him. Crossing the black waters, he went to England to study philosophy at Cambridge, but his real education was outside the university. Ananda Kumaraswamy introduced him to the idea of an Indianness seen through Indian rather than British eyes. He knew Virginia Woolf and a host of other Bloomsbury intellectuals (Woolf's Mrs Dalloway was published in 1925).

And he fell in love with an Irish girl who died in 1927, bringing on the first of a series of nervous breakdowns. It was a tribute to Anand's ability to meet just the right people at the right time that the psychiatrist who treated him briefly was Dr Sigmund Freud.

India carried a host of other memories that he would harvest alongside the ideas he found, dissected, discarded or assimilated in England. Anand's aunt had killed herself after she was excommunicated for sharing a meal with a Muslim woman, inspiring a terrible anger at injustice and at the crippling nature of caste and religious taboos that would never quite leave him.

Tragedy, flight, love, death, intellectual challenge, ideological passion, depression and breakdown, a growing sense of identity, both personal and national""it was quite a lot to pack into a decade.

An article by the Mahatma on the travails of a young untouchable called Uka had already taken root in Anand's mind; when he returned to India, he would show Gandhi the manuscript of his first novel.

Gandhi's criticism was gentle but to the point: Bakha, Anand's protagonist, needed to be less of a Bloomsbury intellectual. The young author spent several months in the Sabarmati ashram rewriting The Untouchable under the guidance of the Mahatma.

Getting The Untouchable published was a struggle; it was rejected by 15 publishers before it was finally accepted, in 1935, the year R K Narayan's Swami and Friends came out. And in 1936, Anand's Coolie, which followed the journey of a boy from the hills into the hard world of labour in Bombay's train stations, came out; and in 1937, Two Leaves and a Bud was published.

A year later, Raja Rao's Kanthapura was published, in 1938; it must have seemed like a heady, promising time for Indian writing.

Between 1939 and 1942, Mulk Raj Anand published an ambitious, if flawed, trilogy: The Village, Across the Black Waters and The Sword and the Sickle chronicled the progress of Lal Singh from a village in Punjab to the battlefields of Flanders.

Most historians of Indian writing in English agree that this is probably the only published World War Two novel. It was by turns sentimental and cynical, but very accurate when it came to depicting the growing disillusionment of men fighting in a war not their own for a foreign country.

In the 1950s, Anand published only one novel""Seven Summers, which was strongly autobiographical. He continued to write, prodigiously: letters, articles, diaries, editorials, but his greatest work was behind him.

The sixties, the seventies, and the eighties saw one volume apiece of his autobiography""Morning Face, Confession of a Lover and The Bubble. But after 1984 there was little of significance from him in terms of a full-length work and the remaining four stages of his autobiography were never completed.

It was the slow sputtering out of a writing career that had begun with the furious energy of a flood in full spate.

It's only bookworms like me who will regret those missing volumes, those unwritten novels, because Mulk Raj Anand lived a fuller life than most.

His writing may have dwindled; there would be no great epic in his old age to match the indignant outpourings of the angry young man, but the passion for life and literature never left him. That, I think, is a sufficient epitaph; and a far less cynical one than Shakespeare would have provided.

nilanjanasroy@gmail.com