Mulk Raj Anand

This chapter focuses on Mulk Raj Anand. Anand's intellectual world was framed by politics, but his concern was largely with social reform and with culture—with art, aesthetics, and with literature. He was very much the social realist, sharply conscious of inequalities and fissures caused by tradition and by urbanization. It is difficult to identify specific influences in Anand's work, given the encyclopaedic reach of his interests, but the intellectuals and writers associated with Bloomsbury shaped his understanding of modernity. He was also inspired by a number of Indian saints and thinkers, but Jawaharlal Nehru and Mahatma Gandhi were central to shaping the course of Anand's early work. Very much like Gandhi and Nehru, he too attempted to reconcile the claims of modernity and tradition in his fiction and his critical writing.