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Mulk Raj Anand
A voice against social injustices, he brought the Indian heartland alive for English readers as few others have.
FACTFILE
Full name
Mulk Raj Anand
December 12
1905
September 28, 2004
Place of birth
Peshawar
University
University of Panjab, Cambridge, London
One of twentieth century best-known Indian writers and a major voice against social injustices, Mulk Raj Anand brought the Hindi heartland alive for English readers as few others have managed.
Best known for his novel
Coolie
, which was made famous by the film of the same name, Anand is amongst the trio who established Indians writing in English outside Bengal.
Mulk Raj Anand was born in Peshawar in 1905. After college education in Amritsar, he studied literature at Panjab University, passing out in1924 with honours. Eager to study further, he went to Cambridge, where he completed his PhD in 1929, becoming amongst the rarest of Indians to get the degree at that time.
He then went on to study and later teach at League of Nations School of Intellectual Cooperation in Geneva. Though he continued to teach in different European institutions, and even worked for the BBC as a scriptwriter and broadcaster, he also began spending time in India, joining the Gandhi-led movement for independence. A la Nehru and Hemingway, he went to Spain during the civil war and was part of the anti-Franco front.
Post Second World War, Anand returned to India to make Mumbai (then Bombay) his base. He joined Kutub Publishing Company and also founded the arts magazine Marg. A fine academic, he taught at several Indian universities over the next decade-and-a-half, including the university he studied in as a student.
Anand began writing professionally during his years in England, though he had displayed an interest even earlier. Fortunate in having as contemporaries a number of authors who would rise to world renown soon after, eg E.M. Forster, Henry Miller and George Orwell, Anand's literary output too became more visible. Forster in fact would go on to write a long preface to Untouchables. It was Gandhi however who became a major influence, which would last a lifetime.
