by Purba Chatterjee “If it is not a simplification I may say, generally, that the youth of India during the last quarter of a century had been going through kind of heroic age. All our gestures, all our thoughts, all our talk—everything that we did—had been inspired by the belief that we must create a new India build a new world.” – Mulk Raj Anand, Apology for heroism, 1942. It is important for our generation to know Mulk Raj Anand, not just as a writer, but as a product as well as an interpreter of the Indian freedom struggle and the ideological revolution it brought forth. This revolutionary period is yet to be understood in the fullness of its world historic significance, and its consequences for a modern Asian future. The intellectual and philosophical work required for such an assessment is more urgent today than ever before. The crisis of liberal democracy on one hand, and the genocide in Gaza on the other, has led to a rejection by the world’s people of the ideological and moral supremacy claimed by the U.S. led Western world order. At the same time, the political and ideological realignments of Afro-Asia signal the birth of a new, more just world centred on humanity instead of the interests of a miniscule western ruling elite. This dangerous, yet hopeful pre-revolutionary moment calls for a reassessment of the ideological forces that have shaped human thought and action for much of modern history. What ideas will win the people and the future? What philosophy of life will define the modern man and woman? And what role must the artist and intellectual play to bring forth this new world peacefully? The generation that produced Mulk Raj Anand was faced with concerns as pressing as these. His worldview was forged in the great moral and political ferment of the world anticolonial movement–the assertion by dark humanity of the freedom to determine their own political, economic and social destinies. The modern, industrial world could be harnessed to free the potential of the downtrodden millions from the shackles of poverty and illiteracy. The newly independent nations did not reject the project of modernity, rather, they sought its completion in alignment with the material and spiritual needs of the people. Mulk Raj Anand was a witness for this zeitgeist, his art imbued with the spirit of rebellion against the failed categories of old; seeking new meaning for human life in the modern world. He was a pioneer of the English Novel in Indian literature, giving it a revolutionary function by wielding it to tell the tragic, yet human story of the poor and disinherited. A founding member of the progressive writers’ movement in India, and founder of the art quarterly MARG, he saw himself as part of an intellectual vanguard, dedicated to the project of nation building through a synthesis of tradition and modernity. Mulk Raj proceeded from the conviction that human beings can know the world, and through struggle, change the world. He believed that through ideas in action, the human being can transform not just his own fate, but by his example, the fate of all mankind. His heroism lay in meeting head-on the challenges that accompany the birth of anything new, never shirking from his revolutionary responsibility to extend knowledge in service of humanity. A study of his life and ideas can arm us with the courage and moral stamina to struggle for the future, and seek revolutionary answers to the urgent ideological questions we are confronted with. Critique of the Western Intellectual Tradition Mulk Raj believed that in order to make sense of the modern world, it was important to understand the West and its traditions of thought. He had occasion to study the European tradition closely in the two decades he spent in England as a student of philosophy. He saw the European Enlightenment, with its emphasis on the centrality of the rational individual to the history, as a revolutionary step forward for humanity. He was impressed by the achievements of Western science in bettering the condition of man, and was attracted to the scientific attitude in the study of history and philosophy because of its implicit forward outlook. However, the loneliness and isolation he experienced as an Indian student in England, caught him up to the fierce individualism and selfishness of Western society, which made community and camaraderie difficult to achieve. He saw that the moral and spiritual growth of the Western man lagged behind his material progress. The pursuit of a narrow personal freedom and material satisfaction had evolved a civilization of superficiality that gave no sustenance to the human soul. Appalled at the humiliating conditions of the coolies in India, Mulk Raj had admired the dignity afforded to work and workers in the West. This illusion was shattered by the bloody violence with which the British government put down the general strike of 1926. It became clear to him that just like his countrymen, the poor and working people of England were yet to be liberated. The ideas of the liberal and industrial revolution of the 19th century, which held such promise for the world, had failed to lead to true democracy. Instead of raising the human being, western science and technology was invested in strengthening the mechanisms of war and colonial exploitation at the heart of Empire. Mulk Raj believed that the western scientific and intellectual tradition had been rendered sterile by the ‘pernicious specialism’ encouraged by liberalism, which kept the various disciplines of natural and social scientific activity divorced from one another, and deliberately agnostic to politics and ideology. He was deeply disappointed by the betrayal of European intellectuals of their own inheritance–the values of the Enlightenment–by abdicating their responsibility to engage with pressing moral and philosophical questions of the time. In light of this ‘trahison des clercs’, Mulk Raj noted that ‘The wise man who in the East still had a sanction in the minds of men, had here become an inessential fool.’ For Mulk Raj, the hypocrisy of the European intelligentsia was exposed most starkly by their cowardly and guilt-ridden stance on the question of Indian independence. The same people who paid lip-service to the high ideals of freedom and democracy, suggested that British rule was ultimately good for India. They claimed that by relegating the business of governance to the more capable hands of the British, Indians could pursue ‘their ancient genius in the arts and the humanities’. They made excuses for the British Empire’s policies to keep education, and the fruits of science and industry, out of the reach of the Indian masses by extolling ‘the merits of an idyllic peasant existence’. Mulk Raj rejected the dishonest distinction made by European intellectuals between the ‘materialistic West’ and the ‘spiritual East’, as an attempt to justify the sub-human condition to which his countrymen had been reduced. He concluded that a purely academic pursuit of knowledge and philosophy was not worthy of him, he owed it to the people who produced him to join the struggle for India’s freedom. And he stood in solidarity with the liberation struggles of the oppressed everywhere, traveling to Spain in 1937 to contribute to the fight against fascism. Mulk Raj believed that the intellectuals of Afro-Asia had far surpassed their European counterparts in developing a broader, more human and forward looking outlook for the modern world. They had rejected the myth of the ‘White man’s burden’ and were challenging the West to live up to the claims of its own civilization by acknowledging the right of the colonized to be free. He writes, ‘Here in England I had found that there was prevalent a profound distrust of heroism or belief, a kind of polite skepticism, a tiredness and a boredom and hopelessness about the future.’ In Asia and Africa however, the faith in the capacity of man to achieve a future free of poverty, exploitation and war was an assertion of faith in life itself. Humanism and a View of The Whole Man ‘I believe, first and foremost, in human beings, in Man…Man, the maker and the breaker of worlds, the entity in whose constant attempts at renewal and adaptation lies all the poetry and grandeur of life.’ Mulk Raj accepted the Hegelian view of history as the unfolding expression of the human spirit, ever marching forward towards a higher freedom. The human being then is both the subject and object of history, and indispensible to any theory that claims to explain the modern, ever-changing world. Importantly he saw that Empire, inconsistent as it was with human freedom, could hardly be a historic necessity. He asserted that the task of forging a new world order from the ruins of colonialism and the world wars, called for a new humanistic philosophy rooted in love for the human being, and faith in his capacity to bend the arc of history towards a higher moral order. The question of whether man’s material well-being superseded his need for spiritual fulfilment, Mulk Raj dismissed as a disingenuous oversimplification. Just as the mad materialistic reach of Western civilization had distorted the human personality and made it cynical and individualistic, so had religious dogmatism reduced man to a servile acceptance of his suffering, by exalting the spiritual over the human. Man needed both bread and soul, the important question being ‘the mere fact of life, whether it was not more valuable than a living death.’ The humanism professed by Mulk Raj called for a view of the whole man that embraced both reason and emotion; the knowledge of facts combined with the imaginative and intuitive. It held that the human being–through knowledge of himself and the world; through creative work with the hand, the heart and the brain–could both transform his material reality, as well as achieve a higher consciousness. And it saw the greatest achievements in art and culture as a manifestation of the human being’s reach for truth, goodness and beauty. At the heart of Mulk Raj’s humanism was the idea of Love as the creative center of human life; the dominant urge behind every human endeavor. He saw Love, not as a personal or sentimental striving, but in its revolutionary essence–as the force which binds all human beings together. A recognition of man’s universal striving for love and community makes it impossible to justify the worldview that war is an expression of man’s animal tendencies, and therefore inevitable. In fact, he viewed the investment of Western civilization in domination and war as an inherently anti-love and anti-human impulse. In light of the degradation of the human being in the modern capitalist society, Mulk Raj believed that socialism alone held the promise of restoring dignity and freedom to every man. He saw the Soviet Union, with its emphasis on uplifting the worker, and its call for planned scientific and industrial development of society, as a revolutionary experiment in extending human freedom and democracy. However, he had no use for dogmatic Marxism, having arrived at socialism through Tolstoy and Gandhi–as an ethical creed rather than a mere economic reorganization of society. While he never lost faith in socialism, he believed that planned progress must be reconciled with the freedom of the individual, for a truly democratic society to prevail. A Witness for The Indian Freedom Struggle Ultimately, it was the Indian tradition that Mulk Raj turned to for answers. The ancient civilizational values of compassion, tolerance and sacrifice–implicit in the teachings of the Buddha, of Kabir and Tukaram-lent themselves naturally to a more complete humanistic philosophy. These values, organic to the Indian masses, were given a modern interpretation by the architects of the freedom struggle, which formed the lifeblood of the great non-violent revolution that turned the tide on two centuries of colonial humiliation. Mulk Raj was a witness for the Indian freedom struggle, and interpreted it for his generation and for the future. He studied its leaders and their thought, convinced that they belonged not merely in the pages of books, but as a living, breathing part of the modern Indian consciousness. Mulk Raj was particularly influenced by Iqbal and Tagore, who he saw not just as poets, but as revolutionary thinkers whose ideas held in them the makings of a new human being. Iqbal too was educated in philosophy in the west, and it was he who encouraged Mulk Raj to pursue studying in London. Confronted with the material and spiritual enslavement of his people under colonialism, Iqbal wrote Asrar-e-Khudi, urging his countrymen to stop being servile and struggle to reclaim their manhood. He put forward the idea that man was a co-creator of the world with God, and could achieve Godlike perfection by becoming increasingly more unique as an individual. This proclamation of human agency and dignity came as a tonic for young writers like Mulk Raj. The effect of Iqbal’s message of hope on them was to ‘release them from the formalistic literary poetry of tradition and to ally them with freedom itself in all its purpose and meaning for human life.’ Like Iqbal, Tagore too was foundational to Mulk Raj’s thinking. He agreed with Tagore’s criticism of western modernity, and was a proponent of his attempt to synthesize the best of western thought with the humanism of the east. Mulk Raj was deeply moved by Tagore’s emphasis on harmony with the natural world, his identification with the folk traditions of Bengal, and his sensitive perception of the inner resilience and beauty of the poor Bengali peasants. The human being was central to Tagore’s thinking, and he saw education as the indispensable path to the full flowering of human potential. He established Viswa-Bharati university in shantiniketan as a revolutionary experiment in a humanistic education bringing together scholars and artists from all over the world to teach, to learn by doing, to participate in rural reconstruction–to become, ultimately, fully integrated and whole as human beings. In the end however, it was Gandhi whose philosophy of ahimsa (nonviolence) and satyagraha (insistence of truth) transformed the Indian people, and made freedom fighters of ordinary men, women and children. Gandhi’s genius, Mulk Raj saw, lay in ‘the uncanny manner in which he could feel the pulse of the masses’ and achieve complete identification with them. The degradation under colonialism of the Indian peasant, who Mulk Raj called ‘the most important man in India’, was at the center of Gandhi’s concern. He lived among the poor, like the poor, and put forward the vision of ‘a new peasant civilization, in accord with the life of India’s seven hundred thousand villages.’ To Mulk Raj, Gandhi was the living embodiment of the moral values he professed, proving incontrovertibly that man can lead by the example of his own life. His time spent living with Gandhi in his ashram at Sabarmati left a deep impression on him, and he would forever hold on to the talisman Gandhi gave him then –‘If you are in despair, think of the poorest man you can help and go to him and your despair will vanish.’ The Artist as A Revolutionary Mulk Raj’s wrote his first novel, The Untouchable, in Gandhi’s ashram. His European colleagues had scoffed at the idea of a novel about the poor, and considered descriptions of their humiliating material conditions to be distasteful and unworthy of high art. However, deeply moved by Gandhi’s love for the castaways of Indian society, Mulk Raj had begun ‘to dream of writing only about the poorest of the poor human beings’. He was particularly invested in the novel as an artform, because of the space it created for a sociological study of human behavior; to probe the human condition in the concrete. His search for a humanism which regards the human being in his totality, led him to insist equally on a truly humanistic view of art. He believed that art had a revolutionary role to fulfil in society-it could not be a purely contemplative and disinterested pursuit. The artist, by virtue of his ability to plumb the depths of human experience, is uniquely capable of achieving a view of the whole Man. Mulk Raj rejected the view engendered by the modern capitalist society that the artistic impulse, although influenced by life, was driven by a self-contained internal logic that did not necessarily reflect life. This view, in his opinion, had led to an esoteric subjectivism that led to distorted ideals of beauty and truth, and to the artist being completely divorced from the lives of ordinary men. At the same time, he stood for ‘art against literary photography’ and advocated a ‘poetic realism’ in art that stressed the importance of the ‘desire image’–not just what is, but what can be. He was convinced that the artist had a higher calling than simply reproducing, often cynically, the reality of the human experience. Instead, the revolutionary artist, through the lens of his imagination and morality, could transform sight into vision, and a knowledge of the world into the will to seek its renewal. For Mulk Raj, all great art sprang from the wellspring of love for the human being, and an investment in human destiny. He believed that the artist, as an ‘interpreter of one human soul to another’, could reveal the essential unity of all human beings. And by exalting love for humanity through the desire image, he could inspire men to seek freedom not in an escape from society, but in their ability to change society through a more complete integration with the people. In this way, the artist could contribute to the formation of a new human being, not beholden to superficial or imposed standards, but driven by the moral imperative to struggle for a better, more human reality for all men alike. The Indian freedom struggle, and particularly the leadership of Nehru and Gandhi, had created conditions for a great artistic and cultural renaissance in India. Mulk Raj saw the progressive writers’ movement in India as the ‘spontaneous emergence of a natural brotherhood of writers’, confronted with the task of making their hard-won freedom real in every sense for the Indian masses. It brought forth an upsurge of literature and poetry in the many regional languages of India, with an emphasis on the lives of the poor, the working class and the peasantry. Mulk Raj saw himself as part of a growing unity of writers all over the world who were breaking out of the framework of isolated intellectual activity, to dive headfirst into the real struggles–moral and political– that confronted the world’s people. He represented India at the International Congress of Writers for the Defense of Culture in Paris (1935) and the World Conference of Intellectuals in Madrid (1937). With Nehru’s support, Mulk Raj was instrumental in organizing the first Asian Writers Conference in New Delhi (1956). This new creed among artists and intellectuals, of struggling for the defense of human freedom and peace, and standing with the world’s oppressed and dispossessed, filled Mulk Raj with great optimism about the future. He proclaimed faith that the enlightened artist and intellectual, by furnishing knowledge and values commensurate with the needs of the time, would serve as the ideological vanguard of the new world being born. Looking forward The ideological revolution started by the anticolonial struggles, and taken up by Mulk Raj’s generation, has unfortunately been left unfinished. In the rush towards globalization in the aftermath of the cold war, the political and ideological guardrails against an uncritical acceptance of the West were lowered. Contrary to what Mulk Raj hoped for, the philosophical and intellectual work required to define what modernity will mean for the dark billions of Asia and Africa has not been embraced by contemporary intellectuals. Equating modernity with the standards of Western civilization, they seek to remake the world in the image of the west. And when this transplanted worldview is inevitably rejected by the people, they lament the backwardness of the masses, and retreat from struggle into the bubble of academia. Most damaging perhaps was the ideological move made by intellectuals towards postmodernism, and the denial of the existence of an objective truth for all men to aspire to. Postmodern theory and rhetoric has trapped the human being in abstractions and narrow categories of identity, obstructing the view of the whole man. It has reduced Love to a narcissist obsession with sexual preference and gender, blunting its revolutionary edge as the path to human fulfilment through community. Ultimately, postmodernism must be seen as an attempt to obscure the unresolved contradictions of western modernity by attacking the human being’s capacity to know themselves and the world. These contradictions have come to a head in our times, in the shape of a profound crisis of the Western world order. The political and economic decline of its primary guardian, the American state, is calling into question the thesis of liberal democracy as humanity’s best hope for progress and freedom. The resounding defeat handed to the liberal consensus with the election of Donald Trump, must be seen as a rejection, by the American people themselves, of the western ruling elite and their world view. It is equally a moral repudiation of the American State’s investment in war and human immiseration, and importantly, its unabashed support for the Israeli state in its genocide of the Palestinian people. This crisis of legitimacy of the American state is a crisis of Western civilization. After the fall of the Soviet Union, the Western liberal elite triumphantly declared the ‘end of history’. Today, we can interpret this as a reflection of their own limited intellectual and moral capacity to contribute to the forward movement of history and knowledge. It is clear that western and west-facing academics–the self-proclaimed gatekeepers of knowledge and discourse–do not have answers for the moral and philosophical questions that humanity needs answered. The world’s people have never been less concerned with the authority of ‘experts’ who have nothing but contempt for them; who claim to speak on their behalf, but are not compelled by any need to know them, their lifeworlds and their aspirations. Everywhere we look, there are signs that humanity is moving forward, despite the attempts of the west to keep it grounded. The spectacular rise of China and the growing world significance of BRICS, foreshadows the undoing of the unipolar world, the only world our generation has ever known. This is what Mulk Raj prophesied, that the future was Afro-Asiatic. The young populations of Asia and Africa are more educated, materially secure, and articulate than ever before. Owing to the gift of technology, they have a knowledge of the world at their fingertips. And they are ready to assume their rightful place in history and take creative part in the struggle for a shared human future. It remains to be seen whether the West will join hands with the world’s people, or whether, unable to accept the loss of its dominance, it will drag us to the brink of nuclear war. The peaceful transition to a new world order, and the working out of a new, coloured modernity is the revolutionary task of our times. Only today it is possible to say that impetus for this transition will come, not from a vanguard of intellectuals and artists as Mulk Raj imagined, but from a democratic struggle of the masses, who are coming into their own. In view of the ways in which the world is changing, the questions that Mulk Raj grappled with take on a new importance and urgency. His critique of Western civilization and modernity is particularly invaluable for our generation, whose understanding of the world is overwhelmingly shaped by the west. He reminds us that it is the human being who makes history, and the world can be what we are willing to struggle for. This is again a time for heroism, for there are great challenges to overcome, but also great hope of completing the anticolonial struggle and making freedom and democracy real for all men. Purba Chatterjee is a peace activist and a member of the Saturday Free School for Philosophy and Black Liberation.
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January 2025
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