C.J. George, Ph.D. (NEHU), PGDTE (CIEFL), is a Reader and Head, Department of English, English, Champhai Government College, Champhai, Mizoram. He has a special liking for creative writing. He has to his credit several publications which include a book on General Foundation Course, entitled, Foundation Course Digest and a novel, Miss Mizoram (Portrait of a Mizo Nun). Besides, he has written a research novel portraying the rich cultural heritage and social life of his community-the Syrian Christians of Kerala.
This book studies in depth and detail, Mulk Raj Anand's all major novels which are truly representative of his artistic genius. After a careful evaluation of the twelve novels which have been studied in this book, a critic of fame commented, "Certainly, the author has worked conscientiously and with steady and painstaking industry. He has studied the novels with care and attended to the details of plot and characters. He has taken notice of major critical pronouncements. He is also involved as a reader who responds with feeling to the incidents and characters. He also shows an admirably balanced perspective in his views. For example, he condemns revivalist fanaticism but refuses to succumb to an uncritical bias against Hinduism."
Undoubtedly, the book makes an Interesting reading. It keeps the reader thrilled by the new insights into the works of Anand and offers fresh interpretations. The book clearly reveals the rigours of real research the author underwent to add to the value of the book. It will be very useful to the students, teachers and researchers of Indian writing in English, particularly those having keen interest in Mul Raj Anand.
Mulk Raj Anand has deservedly come to be regarded as a pioneer of the Indian novel in English. He has endeared himself to millions of readers, throughout the English-speaking world, because of his flair for story-telling and his impassioned humanism. His novels are saturated with deep feeling about the people and places he knows from first-hand experience. He is a realist. He has an imaginative and sensuous apprehension of the Indian society in all its ramifications. And he has an uncanny capacity for empathising with the lowliest of the lowly. He sees people struggling to free themselves from all forms of serfdom. He celebrates the unadorned dignity of the ordinary individual. He is a crusader. There is a sense of battle in his prose. His use of vernacular words and phrases turns of speech has been criticised in some quarters. Some have wrongly attributed it to his imperfect command of the English idiom. But this is no more incongruous or vulgar than Dickens's use of the cockneyor Hardy's use of the dialect. It ensures a kind of authenticity otherwise unattainable. It is a strength, not a weakness. Anand's English narrative can artistically accommodate his sprinkling of the pungent native idiom. It adds local colour to his tales without deflecting attention from the commanding drift of the story.
Dr George has made a sensitive analysis of all the major novels of Mulk Raj Anand in this book. He has been able to demonstrate successfully how Anand's radical social and moral concerns inform his moving fictions about real people seen toiling through vividly depicted sociological vignettes. Dr George's discovery of the sociological question as the mainspring of Anand's fictional imagination deserves appreciation.
Ever since the first Indo-Anglian novel, Rajmohan's Wife by Bankim Chandra Chatterjee was published in 1864, some seven years after the Sepoy Mutiny, many other men of vision and imagination could follow his footprints on the sands of time and succeed remarkably by their creative writing in English, thereby discrediting the skeptical view that Indians cannot write English creatively. Indians, in fact, are blessed with the gift of the tongue and George Orwell in his review on Mulk Raj Anand's The Sword and the Sickle, acknowledged it by saying, "On average, Indians write and even pronounce English far better than any European race." The Indo-Anglian writers not only interpreted India to the West but also made known to the British Masters the natives' displeasure with the colonial rule which in gist, in myriad of voices, echoed the lines:
You taught me language, and my profit on't Is, I know how to curse; the red plague rid you For earning me your language.
Among the Indo-Anglian novelists, certainly, Mulk Raj Anand occupies an enviable position. He modernized the Indian novel. His love for novelty and originality enabled him to carry the tradition of Tagore and Premchand, Bankim and Sarat Chandra to new heights. With his first novel, Untouchable, he, in fact, inaugurated the literature of the underdog. He not only interpreted the soul of India, the real India of the villages to the West, but also convincingly made known to the Colonial rulers the debilitating aspects of their presence in India. After the departure of the British, he shifted his concerns towards the social predicaments and upheavals faced by the emerging republic.
In all his novels Anand stresses the need for a humanistic approach to life. He is an artist with a mission and a poet of the aspiring spirit. Like most Indo-Anglian novelists, he is inevitably concerned with man in society, "man in his circumambient universe".
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