Mulk Raj Anand in the Mud

This chapter takes embodied engagements with the soil as a point of entry into the subaltern war experience. In The Village, Mulk Raj Anand’s novel about a farming family in the Punjab, the protagonist’s visceral knowledge of the landscape symbolises his right to this place. Such moments of touch in the novel articulate an explicit critique of colonial dispossession. A form of protest underwrites similar encounters with the mud of the trenches in Across the Black Waters: a literal erasure of the self, as the sepoy’s body becomes stained with mud, figures as a tangible (and racialised) symbol of a more pervasive threat to agency in wartime. In a final section, this chapter studies the sepoy’s engagement with the soil in a more abstract sense – as paperwork. Anand’s fiction is littered with land debt collection letters and military files. Left unread, these functional documents tangibly emblematise how power worked inconspicuously through the written/printed word, without a fault to the detriment of the farmer-sepoy.