In attacking Indian institutions, Anand employs, in his novels, direct and indirect means. Direct assault occurs in the author's own commentaries and, in narrative or dramatic framework, as discussion and debate between characters or monologue and soliloquy of single characters. Indirect attacks appear in plots, settings, situations, episodes, above all in characterizations, as these are affected by Indian institutions.

Major social institutions which Anand portrays as wholly or partially damaging to individual human persons are caste, religion, aspects of sex and marriage, and system of education. (p. 44)

Anand's novels present caste as only one element 'in the complex texture of social and economic particularism and inequality in Indian society.' The author nevertheless sees this system as crucial, 'tying together all the other elements into a rigid structure.' At every level of society the characters more or less precisely understand their caste positions and, except for the reformers, acquiesce in caste cruelties….

[With] untouchability, Brahmanism is a major target of Anand's attack on the Indian social order. Even Brahmans of lowly occupation—waterboys, cooks, other menials—are typically portrayed as grasping, hypocritical, lascivious bullies, distinguished only by circumstances and crudeness from temple priests and family chaplains. Such figures are Lachman of The Untouchable and Varma and Lehnu of The Coolie. (p. 45)

At the other end of the scale are the untouchables, about whom Anand wrote in his first novel, The Untouchable …, and in his last thus far, The Road…. In the first especially, Anand depicts the filth, poverty, disease, and degradation of the sweepers of excrement in a country where the toilet is little known and elimination performed everywhere. (pp. 45-6)

The case against untouchability, presented so directly in the last pages of the first novel, reappears in the short tale, The Road, almost thirty years later. Here the effort of an enlightened landlord, a rare creation for Anand, to unite caste groups and untouchables in building the road indispensable for modernization results, successively, in tragedy, collaboration, and reversion to separatism, but not without permanently affecting the untouchable boy, Bhikhu. In another procedure rare for this author, Anand omits all direct commentary in favor of a simple dramatic narrative which sees Bhikhu in the end take the new road out of the village Govardhan 'towards Gurgaon, which was the way to Delhi town, capital of Hindustan, where no one knew who he was and where there would be no caste or outcaste.'…

Anand's depiction of caste shows … that no one is ever so low that someone else is not lower, that snobbery flourishes everywhere. (p. 47)

Anand's indictment of caste is complicated in some of the novels by his tendency to show it as yielding in importance to class considerations…. The tactic of underplaying caste or birth consideration in favor of rich-poor dichotomies and capital-labor oppositions is a major part of Anand's Socialist literary strategy. With few exceptions all the novels attack lallas, banias, and shopkeepers less as claimers of caste privilege than as more or less wealthy men who cheat and rob the poor. In the long run, however, class remains only another complication in the ancient system.

A striking example of the relationship appears in The Big Heart. Here Anand coordinates caste, class, and communal affiliation with a completeness not apparent in The Coolie or The Sword and the Sickle. (p. 48)

The aspirations of Thathiar Murli to move up, with his family, into the Kasera caste provokes a disunity among the copper-smiths which, added to the heretical worship of the Aga Khan by some of their women, the revivalist beliefs of peaceable Arya Samajists and fanatical Sanatanis, the quarreling of political factions, the workers' blind fear of the machine, Ananta's illicit liaison, and Hindu-Muslim hatreds fomented by the enemy prevent the successful consolidation of the workers against their Capitalist masters. In no other novel has Anand so attempted to organize a whole social, economic, and political picture. While his attack on Capitalism is, if anything, more vehement than ever, his inclusion of caste complications renders his message more than usually realistic. (pp. 48-9)

Caste in India has traditionally been based on religion, on concepts of dharma and karma resting, in their turn, on a view of reality as essentially transcendental. For Anand, then, religion is the true bête noir. (p. 49)

Anand's most pervasive and bitter attacks against the Indian social order are directed against religion in the sense of a mystical appeal to trans-human forces and the expression of that appeal through 'superstitious' ritual. As usual Anand attacks through direct commentary and through dramatization. It is difficult to select any one novel as more relevant than another to this theme; all are permeated with the attitude that religion is 'the opiate of the people,' the major tool of Capitalists, landowners, moneylenders, merchants, and priests for subjugating the poor and maintaining vested interests. The attack focuses on two levels: the popular religion of the lowly, the illiterate, women; and the rationalized religion of 'unenlightened' educated groups like the Arya Samaj, the Sanatanis, Congress.

The Village and The Road are strong in portrayals of popular Hinduism, with its fear of avenging gods, its personal ritualistic devotion to chosen deities, its notions of karma, dharma, and maya as providing explanation for present suffering, motivation for present action, hope for future good. The end result of popular religion, as Anand portrays it, is fatalism, passive acceptance of present evils as somehow divinely ordained and best endured without revolt. Such an attitude is viewed as radically discouraging to social change and productive of what one character describes as 'the abjectness into which the gentleness of their religious faith and the power of their priests … had schooled them.' (pp. 49-50)

[Anand] portrays the lower classes as resistant to change because of religious fatalism. The upper classes, on the other hand, he depicts as paying allegiance to the Vedic religion of the Arya Samaj and, in that capacity, equally averse to revolutionary change. (p. 51)

While Anand's novels show sympathetic acceptance of much Western thought in social as well as political and economic spheres, towards Christianity they display little understanding or sympathy. When Christianity does appear, as in Colonel Hutchinson's preaching of the Gospel, Lal's interview with the Bishop in Across the Black Waters, the love interests of Clara Young of The Old Woman and of Dorothy Thomas and June Withers of The Private Life, it is quickly dismissed as a religion productive of narrowness, easy toleration of war, self-indulgence, arrogance, stress on sin, and hostility to sex. (p. 54)

It is religion, in Anand's view, which really perpetuates the worst evils in India, those that undermine a man's right to develop to full capacity….

In his novels Anand … attacks Indian religion, especially the notions of dharma and karma, as the center round which Indian institutions gravitate and from which they cannot get free. One of the areas in which this religion, this dharma operates most adversely for the individual, as portrayed by Anand, is that including women, marriage and family life.

Anand's single novel with a female protagonist, The Old Woman and the Cow, carries as its epigraph a quotation from an epic of Nicholas Necrassov, nineteenth-century Russian poet, which, in part, says: God himself has lost the keys to the welfare and freedom of women.

Only once does Anand give sustained attention to this theme, but certain abuses against 'the welfare and freedom of women' recur frequently in his novels. Women as workers in factory and field are seen as subjected to greater cruelties and deprivations than men. Low-caste girls are portrayed as easy prey for upper-caste lust, as with Sohini of The Untouchable and Leila of Two Leaves and a Bud…. Young wives are depicted as easily cast off…. (p. 56)

In 'the hapless country where the place of women is still governed by Manu Smriti and the Hindu Mitakshra Law,' a host of tribulations, as pictured in Anand's novels, begins with the arranged marriage. Here the partners are, 'like oxen,' sold or given in marriages arranged by their parents. (p. 57)

[Conventional] Hindu marriage and family life, as Anand sees it, is a matter of self interest and not for love. 'Parents breed children, not for others, but to serve them in their old age.'

Besides negtive ideas about love and marriage, however, Anand has some positive views, expressed directly only in the late Private Life of an Indian Prince…. Anand's attack on conventional Hindu marriage is also re-inforced by his approval of 'free love,' as it is exercised by the lovers of Two Leaves and a Bud, The Sword and the Sickle, and The Big Heart. These partners are portrayed as enjoying a basically true and good union outside conventional marriage. (pp. 58-9)

Still, even a true union of man and woman can, in Anand's eyes, damage the Revolution; the heroes must learn to subordinate the one to the other…. Anand's solution to the problem is clear. The Revolution is first; personal love second. (p. 59)

The average Hindu woman, as Anand portrays her, does not develop freely as an autonomous human being with a unique fund of human creativity. However honored her role as mother and wife, she is depicted, apart from these functions, as a subordinate, to be controlled and used for male comfort and advantage. Bound by innumerable customs and taboos, she is strictly subject to men in the disposition of her life and talent.

Gauri's self-directed liberation from Indian conventions surrounding women and marriage is portrayed by Anand as a direct result of indoctrination by those devoted to helping India. 'Education,' Gauri says, quoting Doctor Mahindra, 'will make us masters of our destiny, not religion.' Such learning, according to Anand, should be the goal of the educational system in India; unfortunately, as his novels indicate, he did not find this to be the case….

Considering the severity of Anand's non-fictional attacks on pre-1947 Indian education, it is surprising that the novels pay relatively little attention to the subject. On the one hand, all the protagonists, except Gangu and Gauri, have or aspire to have learning as a means of wisdom….

Along with his protagonists' felt need of education, however, Anand points out, especially in The Lament and Seven Summers, abuses in Indian education. Brutality, perversion, favoritism, extortion, are typically attributed to schoolmasters, along with rote learning devoid of understanding and a deadening curriculum. Higher educational levels are marked by caste snobbery, inculcated in Indian homes, and by development of scorn for common work…. (p. 60)

Exaggerated respect for degrees, ridiculed in many of the novels, is rooted, according to Anand's portrayals, in paternal ambition for advantages to be secured by educating sons for employment in government offices. The catch to this, as The Lament points out, is an alarming oversupply of degree-d young persons, and frustrations resulting, not only from unemployment, but also from alleged corruption in government bureaucracy, shown as awarding jobs largely on the basis of caste, gratuity, and 'political' recommendation.

None of these charges, however, is quite so relevant to Anand's Marxist message as the indictment of academic and intellectual persons for noninvolvement in social reform. In some cases the inaction is viewed as the result of excessive research and balancing of evidence; in others as cowardice. (p. 61)

Anand's attack on the Capitalist system is executed in the novels by direct and indirect presentation of the evils of private ownership, private enterprise, and the profit motive in business. Even in the first novel, The Untouchable, Sarshar the Socialist calls for a casteless and classless society. In depicting the road to such a society, Anand does more than dramatize the issues with plots, themes, and settings. His 'approved' characters boldly expound the Socialist program and, with dialectic and oratory, confound their opponents-villains, 'respectable' compromisers, and sincere but unenlightened men. (p. 63)

Specific settings are used to provoke anger and moral indignation. The Coolie offers the strongest examples: detailed accounts of the Tata steel works at Jamshedpur, the pickle factory in Daulatpur, cotton mills in Bombay—all complete with female and child labor and dangerous and disease-ridden environment. To its minute account of the horrors of home and field, Two Leaves and a Bud adds statistical reports of contemporary economic sociologists. In most of the novels, streets, crowded by day with starved, virtuous poor and fat, gloating rich and by night with wretched hordes of sleepers, are common scenery.

Anand's Marxist aesthetic required him to present 'a true, historically concrete representation of reality in its evolutionary development.' This policy Anand scrupulously observes. (pp. 63-4)

The characters most of all carry the burden of Anand's attack. These 'personify economic categories' and 'embody class relations.' The most crassly propagandistic are the British Capitalists and the oppressed coolies of Two Leaves and a Bud. More subtlety is achieved in some of the characters of The Sword and the Sickle. The oppressive land baron, the Nawab of Nasiribad, for example, is not all black. Shrewd, courteous, humorous, warm-blooded, he exercises his villainy chiefly in delegating to others the planning and execution of methods for maintaining power. Others are caricatures. Like all Anand's police, Captain Effendi epitomizes unrelieved brutality…. On the left is Count Kanwar Rampal Singh, one of Anand's best developed characters, a maverick aristocrat, wealthy, cultivated, vain, comic, generous, dynamic, ultimately a dilettante and a coward in his conduct towards the Revolution…. Lal is the ideal young man, of peasant stock, somewhat educated, seasoned by suffering, combining strength of body with acuity of mind, knowledge with action, self-sacrifice with passion, pity with adverse judgment. (pp. 64-5)

Some characters, however, are conceived in a little different temper, are touched with a spirit of doubt, pessimism, and foreboding not completely attuned to Socialist propaganda. Of the two main Capitalist figures, Murli is the lascivious, socially ambitious hypocrite; Gokul, the moderate man, ready, in the interests of business at least, to consider new relations with the workers. (p. 65)

The Socialist revolutionaries of Anand's novels use various means: small meetings with the agitators, jathas, mass meetings with mob oratory, marches and processions, strikes, songs, slogan-shouting, newspapers. But, warns the arch-Communist Sarshar, if such activities are merely permeated with sentiment, they will culminate in terrorist tactics fatal, in the long run, to the movement…. (p. 66)

For pre-Independence India, Capitalism was identified with colonialism; the great political enemy was the British. Anand's pre-1947 novels quite naturally attack the English Sarkar at every turn, as the major source of India's ills, the preserver of corrupt social institutions, the exploiter of Indian labour and wealth, the tyrant over civil liberties. (p. 67)

Besides … direct attacks, Anand designed situations, settings, and characters to show the 'wickedness' of the British. At the top are the 'prestigious,' more or less remote persons who leave the 'dirty work' of implementing orders to lower associates….

In contrast with such men Anand presents a few English characters who struggle to alleviate the lot of the exploited. The poet-physician John de la Havre of Two Leaves is one…. In general, Anand portrays no meaningful human relations between the races…. (p. 69)

The color factor as a sign of political as well as social distinction is played up throughout the novels. The White man, the Gora, is seen as the Power controlling India. Next in rank are the Brown skins, the upper castes, intent on prompt seizure of power relinquished by the English. At the bottom are the Black (and sometimes the Yellow), who are the Powerless oppressed….

In addition to general tyranny and political skulduggery connected with industry and agriculture, the British are accused of shining up to Indians in time of war, using Indian men as cannon fodder in battles not their own. The World War I novel, Across the Black Waters, is in fact, an indictment against such British chicanery as well as a tract against war.

Political evil, however, in Anand's novels, is not limited to the British. India's dominant political power, the Congress Party, is attacked for vices including contempt for peasants and workers, self-interest, and Revivalist and reactionary attitudes toward industry and modernization generally. (p. 70)

Anand's attacks on political, as well as social and economic institutions, are carried out mainly on behalf of India's poor, in the effort to destroy forces inimical to their development, and to build a world of freedom and equality where human potential can flourish. That service Anand believed to be founded on the ancient Indian ideal of bhakti-yoga.

Anand's novels look outward to institutions and systems involving groups of people, and inward to the psychology of the individual person and his interpersonal relations. If these views be labeled respectively Anand's socialist and his humanist views, then the inevitable third term arises: the relation between the two. For Anand the third term is bhakti, the relation of personal, efficacious love between the members of the units of society—family, community, nation, or world.

It is the maintenance of this relationship of loving service which constitutes the 'wholeness' of Anand's ideal man. It is, indeed, as clearly pointed out in The Big Heart, a new religion, i.e. a new value system supplanting 'superstitious' personal devotion to God by rational devotion to man, which Anand proposes to his countrymen. The traditional religion of India, he maintains, made men indifferent to ills on this earth. The new religion of bhakti requires impassioned, practical effort to remove, not only external signs of ill—filth, poverty, pain, disease, hunger, ignorance—but the roots of it in social, political, and economic institutions. There is no other world, Anand's wisdom characters repeatedly proclaim; therefore, if they are to find it at all, men must find happiness here. The condition for human progress is the fullest possible freedom and equality for all; bhakti strives toward such a condition. (pp. 72-3)

Long passages of reflection by Ananta as well as by Purun Singh [in The Big Heart], conversations between them, and speeches made at meetings develop Anand's conception of bhakti, an ideal lived out 'unto death' by Ananta. Bhakti becomes, in fact, the keystone arching Anand's Socialist and humanist views. It is concerned at once with personal, individual happiness and fulfillment and with the building up of more satisfactory social institutions.

Anand's doctrine of bhakti, exemplified in Purun and Ananta, has a number of characteristics. It is related to the Sikh religion and associated with political activity. It is simultaneously concerned with building on an ancient, still dynamic Indian tradition, at least as old as the Gita and carried forward by saints of medieval India, and with replacing old forms with new. Besides substantial dedication of time and energy, it demands courage, heroic self-sacrifice, freedom from self-seeking, and universal tolerance and compassion, with special care for the poor. (p. 74)

What is the relation of Anand's Socialism and of his humanism to his art? Anand is technically unable to cope with the dangers to art of 'writing for a cause.' If the first requirement of the good novel, springing from its characters is to be interesting, then the Socialist stereotyping of so many kinds of people—Brahmans, schoolteachers, Capitalists, moneylenders, landlords—becomes intolerable. The same holds of situations, settings, and actions. Such stereotyping fatally betrays a 'center of consciousness' lacking in discernment and in emotional responsibility. Anand himself, discussing the failures in characterization of Two Leaves, blames them, not on Socialist bias, but on his lack of compassion at the time of the writing. This lack is probably less relevant than the defective insight attendant on an exclusively Marxist aesthetic and the substitution of easy banalities for the hard work of the imagination. Thackeray, for example, is not really a compassionate novelist, but he is a powerful one.

On the other hand, Anand's novels vary in merit. When Socialist prescriptions are forgotten, suspended, or relaxed, and the freedom of the artist asserts itself, Anand can produce a Village, a Big Heart, or a Seven Summers.

In such cases Anand's humanism gives effective formal expression to the dignity of the individual person in the lowest ranks of society, struggling to realize his potential—though in doing so the author often forgets the dignity and the value of persons who are rich. Because humanism resists dogmas, serves no system, delivers no patterns of procedure, it opens the doors to artistic freedom, as Socialism closes them. To Anand's humanism is due the good things in his books: the more particularized characters, the more authentic interplay of persons and environment, the occasional 'centers' of keen awareness and rich response, effective imaginative passages.

In The Big Heart Anand approaches most nearly to a balance between his humanist insights and his sociological zeal. Regrettably he does not fully achieve the goal. What finally spoils that work is that what should have been the most humanist of emphases, bhakti, is, in this novel, made the tool of a political cause.

In his theory of the novel Anand demanded of the writer simultaneous detachment and engagement. Engagement Anand had, in high degree. Unfortunately for his novels, he did not achieve the detachment, disinterestedness, freedom from commitment to causes which might have enabled him to create 'centers of consciousness' more authentic, penetrating, and finely responsive to the nuances of human behavior and the complexities and depth of human affairs. (pp. 95-6)

What, finally, is the value of Mulk Raj Anand's novels? It is the witness they offer of India's agonizing attempt to break out of massive stagnation and create a society in which men and women are free and equal, in which they can, therefore, live dynamically and creatively.

It is the testimony they give of a generation of Indians familiar with the best and the worst of the West and with the best and the worst of India.

It is the evidence they afford of the modern educated Indian's struggle to identify himself and his country in the context of modern world society and to find roots that yet live in a mouldering heritage.

It is the search they pursue for a center, a principle of unity, which the West, theoretically, has found in the virtue of charity and which Anand knows as bhakti.

The critic can only regret that with such noble matter, Anand's considerable talents and energies should so early and so long have operated in the restrictive climate of a doctrinaire aesthetic. (p. 97)

Margaret Berry, in her Mulk Raj Anand: The Man and the Novelist (© 1971 by Oriental Press Publishers; reprinted by permission of Oriental Press/APA Amsterdam-Maarssen), Oriental Press, 1971, 114 p.