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.
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| 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
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