SOURCE: "The Sources of Protest in My Novels," in The Literary Criterion, Vol. XVIII, No. 4, 1983, pp. 1-12.

[In the following essay, Anand discusses the artistic principles that informed his novels and the relationship between his life and writings.]

Various studies of my novels by scholars have, in recent years, confirmed what I tried to show in the autobiography of my ideas, Apology for Heroism, as also in the autobiographical novels, that there has always been an emergent connection between my life and my writings, throughout my creative career.

Of course, some critics have interpreted my obsession with truthful presentation of the realities of life as ideological. Quite a few members of our academic intellegentsia are addicted to terms like classicism, romanticism, realism, and naturalism, which make for abstract analysis of novels. They often ignore the pressure of human life, the compulsion of which on the writer's conscience, may be through miscellaneous inspirations in the novel specially in evolving characters, and tracing their motivations from the reservoir of faiths and individual diversities. The anarchy of feelings is indistinct in nature. Emotions are woven into the texture of a fictional narrative, from uncontrolled impulses. Each novel might, therefore, compel internalist interpretation.

Not from external standards, of principles of criticism, built on the traditions of the novel, which arose in the West from the 18th Century downwards should our own fictions be judged. Our interpreters have to sense the collective unconscious of our own people, from the inherited oral cultures, in decay or renewal. In this way, the critics may be able to judge our fictional works, more creatively as they would then go to the sources of our insights into the concrete human situations rather than through abstract theories which don't yield novels.

There have been pioneering critiques of this kind from the study of sources of creations of novelists and poets, in the West, like those by Edmund Wilson in The Wound and the Bow, by D. H. Lawrence in his Studies in Classic American Fiction, by John Middleton Murry in his Son of Woman, by George Lukacs in his essays on Thomas Mann, and by Edward Thompson in Rabindranath Tagore. These examples have been lost on our commentators. Our critics unconsciously belong to the category, described by Jean Paul Sartre, as always in unhappy relationships with their wives who have to wait for them to come to dinner, because they can't tear themselves away from reading classics and evolving categories to define each mood, feeling and idea. Most of the critics, who have written about my novels, have not noticed that my fictions arose from the compulsion of life, which have been reenacted by me, again and again. They treat my fictional works according to the dates of publications, in chronological order in the dominant English manner, where text is all. And if the text reveals men and women in dirty clothes, soiled hands and perspiring faces, they are unsavoury. Said Edward Garnett: 'We English don't like characters in rags to come into our drawing rooms'. And the Brown Sahibs feel the same way about novels which deal, as E. M. Forster once said, 'with the seedy side of life'.

I made my first conscious protest as a writer, when I came away from Bloomsbury after hearing the critic, Edward Sackville West, declare: 'There can be no tragic writing about the poor! They are only fit for comedy, as in Dickens: The canine can't go into literature'.

I was just then writing Untouchable. I left London and went to Gandhi's Sabarmati Ashram in 1927. There I learnt some sincerity, truthfulness and simplicity. And as the Mahatma sent me to the people, before I should write any more novels, from that time onwards my protests about the human predicament under the Empire, and in the atmosphere of our own decay, became self-conscious. I persistently examined my own conscience. I had intimate experience of villages, small town people, big town grandies, experience of life's little ironies, tragedies and struggles.

All experience then became the reservoir from which I wrote my fictions, hoping to transform the raw material of life freely into communicable forms, rather than accept the mould of the rigid objective form of Flaubert. Personal as my novels are, based on my experiences, they are written by an 'I' at some distance from myself and the characters. The resulting fictions may have sometimes seemed amorphous. Much as the novelist may try to control people's lives, the imperceptible feelings of characters, and their emotions tend to overflow, as in Balzac, Tolstoy and Proust.

My novels were intended to be different from others, departure from the upper and middle section fictions of Tagore. I wished to recreate the folk, whom I knew intimately, from the lower depths, the lumpens and the suppressed, oppressed, repressed, those who had seldom appeared in our literatures, except in Sarat Chatterji, Prem Chand and Bibhuti, Tarashankar and Maneck Bannerji.

I had realised after my stay in Sabaramati Ashram, that I could not stand alone, always looking at the heaven's where the Gods live, because they were now hidden behind the twilight. I was, however, face to face with humans, specially the hollow cheeked men with dazed eyes, the women who grew old from drudgery and forced child-bearing before they were young, naked children with distended bellies and big eyes, beggars whining for alms, my widowed aunts, my drunkard uncles, stalwart sepoys, Pathan frontiermen frightened of the Ferungies and carrying guns, in fact men and women in a world reduced to slavery. Daridvanarayan, or the God incarnate, were the flesh and blood for me to worship. And in the struggle for emergence of which they were part, each contact brought the sense of a certain sacredness. A new kind of religion was then, emergent in my novels, a religion of love for people. Worship of each character, became a passion behind the writing. I accepted all the strengths and weaknesses of the people. Maybe empathy for human beings, makes for a tennous relationship, enabling the novelist to remain within himself, and yet be with others, a pervasive relationship of Leviathanic complexities.

As the relationship between the author and others revealed the horrors of the inequalities through which those above have perpetrated cruelties on those below, generation after generation, either through caste discrimination, or the power of the Rajas over the Ryots, or priests with the rigid ritualistic prejudices, I allied myself with the urges of men to free themselves through whispers of discontent, or sighs in half-sleep, or in violent and nonviolent actions. In this way, I sensed the pain of life, which the more privileged took out of the weaker members of the flock. I knew the patriarchs who enslaved women by imposing conventions which curtailed their freedom, behind the prison of purdah or semi-purdah. I was aware of the ignorance of the underprivileged, who expiated their own miseries, by celebrating ritual murders. I was aware of the miseries of the rich who were always in fear of losing their worldly wealth. I was aware of the Imperial state with its Gods and goddesses, George Panjim and Mallika Mary. I gave up the systems of philosophy. Unable to sleep easily, I woke up every morning to see how men and women dreaded other men and women, how they bowed before the White Sahibs, the Bania moneylenders, and the officers. There were millions of the disinherited who ate only one meal a day. If I could not physically 'wipe every tear from every eye' as Gandhiji said we must do, I felt I could utter a thousand cries to wake up people, free them from the weight of slumber. As every prayer of the folk was to an idol of a past dead myth, I felt I could create myself, and others, who had become bundles of infantile disorders, suffering in the various seasons of hell, under the reign of Yama, by looking into other people's eyes, to see 'the light in smiles'. Only insights and outsights into the anarchic world, might bring inner maturation to human beings. The terror of one's self, may be got over, by asking everyday, as in Brihdaranyaka Upanishad: 'who am I?', 'where do I come from?', 'And where am I going?'. I would have to recognise my identity, as an Indian, not subservient to the white rulers. And I would have to be a man without the help of an anthropomorphic God. I knew it would be difficult to be free men from all the fears. But I had hunches about freeing myself and others into our passions for breaking out of uncertainties.

As I felt many inchoate urges in the days of my growth, I came to awareness of things beyond the fixtures of dastur, custom through daily experience of human misery and the pain of life.

I saw the mandala of Gods of my mother, on which stood images of Guru Nanak, Krishna, Aga Khan, Yessuh Messaih and a snake engraved on metal. I asked questions about them. They were not answered, until my father, a fashionable Arya Samajist told me that our ancestors had made thunder and lightening into Indra, the sky into Varuna, and the Sun into Surya. Gone was this exalted cosmic view in our time. But in spite of explanations about the origin of Gods, the God with a big beard, sitting in top of the sky, which most people believed in, lingered in my fear-haunted imagination. So when a young cousin of mine died at the age of nine of T.B. I wrote a letter of protest to the God in heaven asking Him how He could take away the little innocent who had committed no fault.

I noticed that, among my playmates, were boys and girls, who were considered superior, if they were the children of parents in big houses, and inferiors if they were the children of parents in small shabby hutments. And our parents asked us to have a bath after playing with children from the hutments, because we may have touched untouchables. I early realised that, as we were of the Kshatriya caste, we were superior, with Brahmins above us, and Vaishya shop-keepers slightly inferior to us, and all out-castes far far below us. The cruelty of this God-made order came home to me, when Bakha, a sweeper boy, brought me home bruised in the head by an accidental stone. My mother abused him for carrying me and touching me. And she bathed me even though I was bleeding. This little incident was to remain in my conscious-unconscious, and became a passion for justice against the old old fixtures of non-human discrimination against untouchables. And this passion became the protest implicit in my first published novel Untouchable which has been called the proto-type of the protest novel in the new world, now emergent from the dead systems, supposedly ordained by the supreme God. The opposition of the superior and inferior became an obsession with me long before I read Marx.

I became early aware of the anomalies of our family. My father belonged to a coppersmith brotherhood of Amritsar, who had worked for generations on the Golden Temple, and made utensils. He went to a Christian School. And, on passing Matric, he joined the British-Indian army as a clerk. He observed the customs of the Coppersmith brotherhood, even when he presided over the local Arya Samaj. On the other hand, as a 'servent of the Sahibs', he had become a 'Shadow Colonel', and adopted George V as God Almighty, Andaata, giver of bread. Although read in advanced literature of the West, he agreed to arrange marriages, dowries for his two elder sons, which cut short their studies, and forced them to become part of the order of Babus, used by the alien Sarkar for the routine work of the empire.

The ceremonies of weddings were performed by Brahmins according to Vedic rites, burning good ghee to banish evil spirits. Prayers were pronounced in a language, which not even the priests understood. Infinite repetition of high sounding words was necessary. The aim of the recitations was not to evoke thoughts, but to perpetuate the supremacy of worship, pujapath.

I once fainted as a boy, when I saw a goat being butchered in the temple of Kali, where my mother used to take me in our hometown. I never got over the revulsion from this murder. And it is from my tenderness for living things that my indignation against the mumbo jumbo of ritual arose. I began to feel that living words of creative writing are inspired, not by rhetorical repetition, but from maturing of insights, through experience of pain, and may take warmth from sympathy.

The incident which upset my own childlike admiration of the Pink Sahibs was insignificant enough. I salammed the Adjutant Sahab of my father's regiment and started at him out of curiosity. He hit me with a cane and I went crying to my father, who did not say anything, but accepted the punishment I got for the crime of looking up to the Sahib.

Later in April 1919, when Police Raj was declared by the alien Sarkar in Amritsar, to stop the protests against the Rowlatt Act, forbidding gatherings of four people, I went out of home to see what the curfew was about—I was caught by the police and kept chained to many others all night. Next morning I was given seven stripes of the cane by an Indian policeman, under orders of the Anglo-Indian Superintendent of Police. I shrieked at the punishment. My mother came and rescued me, tearing her hair in anger against the red-faced Afsar. I could never forget her helpless rage against the police. And when my father refused to notice the bruises on my body, I was confirmed in my dim feelings of rebellion against him and the Sarkar. I realised that the army and the police and the law were the Indian instruments of the Ferungi, instruments of the King Emperor, himself an instrument of a big machine which devoured human beings in the empire.

I began to listen to the terrorists, who wanted to abolish those who made war on people, by throwing bombs on the oppressors.

Later, being too weak for such heroism, I listened to the message of non-violence of Gandhi. The Mahatma was talking of a bloodless sacrifice, of accepting lathi blows against the bloodshed by the ruling power. I felt the vast oppression from behind an invisible wall, which prevented Gods in Whitehall from listening to the Mahatma's still small voice. In between there were the preachers of Christian ethics. But the rulers were stuffed up dummies of automatic power, hollow inside while the abstract Sarkar was an organised oppression, with bayonets and machine guns, which were to ensure the carrying of the white man's burden of responsibility of Kipling's Indian native, 'half-savage half-child'. And most of the natives accepted the hollowmen, as masters, so long as they got the paltry silver coins at the end of every month.

The primitivist expression, including the use of ugly words, epithets and staccato phrases, in my novels of the lost Utopia of childhood, shows that people had retained some sense of honour, as they felt that the rape of mother and sister was an insult.

So the alienation of my principal characters with their hopeless ventures in freedom, was presented in tragedies, which are not realistic, but expressionist dramas of struggle between the poetic ambition of heroes to emerge from the depths of degradation, to recover their human inheritance. Only my new heroes-antiheroes were not deliberately uplifted into a classical world, and presented in allegory. They were kept within the framework of personal experience in a time-bound world. They may become symbols of struggle and may later appear as new mythical figures, representing youth as urging towards freedom. Against the idea that their fate has been determined before their birth, but they are angels struggling in the dawn.

My novels, then, to me are whirlpools where I have been able to meet individuals in the chaos, in relative distinction from each other, in the midst of indistinction. I have returned, in each fiction to recognise some people in the undifferentiated mass. And in the recognition, from alliance, has been a kind of expiation of my burning conscience about the sufferings of men and women. The writing of each novel has been an effort to be with others, while remaining myself, in the area of freedom, which is love. If the life of each individual is in kinship with other lives and yet a unique mystery, into which we can only have glimpses, every human being is a god or a goddess. And every insult, every humiliation, every deprivation, every lowering of dignity, must be protested. Because only by the love we give to others can we be human, only in the defence of the divine status of human beings, have we the opportunity to end the alienation of men and women from each other, brought by fear, petty differences, and the confusions of dark-mindedness, which swarm around to ghosts and demons of the night.

The yoke of pity has been carried by some of the most sensitive men in every generation in our land. It has relieved every age. As pity is in essence, love, I have tried to rescue this love, which becomes love of life in every form, against hatred, which is the death of love. In this sense, love takes the place of God. And as the defiance of all those offences, injuries, deceits, lies and murders of the body-soul, becomes holy anger, my protests are expressions of my holy anger.

As love is the core of human relations, the very first need of men and women, from which comes procreation, family, the social group, and the state we have to see how, in the evolution of life, the old primitivist tokens, totems and taboos have survived and been accepted as eternal inspirations in the name of tradition. So much so that the cautionary words and images, which were to sanctify and preserve human relations as sacred, have been perverted, and life has often been sacrificed in the name of religion. That is why the poet Iqbal cried out from the depths of our degradation, in the early years of our century:

       'To tell the truth Oh Brahmin old,
       The idols in thy temple have grown cold'.

In my novels, therefore, which seek to recreate living human relations, in all their intricacies, I have been compelled to be concrete (realistic if you like to put it that way), I have tried and looked at the realities of life, hoping that each day be a new day of happiness with a new Sun, a new moon, with new people who may inherit the good things of the past, but may look to the future. This may have meant wandering through the labyrinths, but one can recognise one's own face, and the faces of others, not by servitude to fixed images, but by living experience of men and women only, through a religion based on love.

My characters were not meant to be revised versions of old mythical symbols of the epics. I think that human beings change, in a changing universe, even if ever so little. So old mythical characters like Sita, or Savitri, or Rama, are not eternal types, who must be repeated in new incarnations. My characters are conceived as human beings of a different historical age which is not the changeless samsara of tradition. They struggle in this life, on earth, in the here and the now, even as their struggles end in failures. Or they grope in the dark, and then emerge here and there, through our new contemplations and reveal the contours of the still mysterious universe, defined in the past through fear, but now being revealed through adventures in the heavens and on earth.

My new myths also aspire to some certainties in the religion of man. Every happenstance can lead to fresh realisation of Space-time continuance. The writer and the artist are ever in search of new myths to escape fixations. Many old certainties dissolve. Some, which are relevant, are assimilated. But changes of style in art and literature, are due to the crisis of creation, when men and women renounce the old dead symbols to create new myths, in search of the freedom to grow and renew the jaded personality. Renewal is eternal. Otherwise men remain dead-in-life. Renaissance is the cue for all human passions in the freedom to grow over to higher consciousness.

Apart from the essentiality of metaphorphical protest about the human predicament in a time in which the Gods have failed, mine is the willed extroversion of hope against despair, perchance the monolithic state may break down, through its own mechanical failures.

I feel that war is the ultimate sacrifice of victims, offered up by men of power, in which both victors and vanquished, face death, which is the arbiter of human destiny.

The dehumanisation of man reaches its apotheosis in the armed subjection of people. The cruelty and barbarism of absolute power, sanctified by past Rajas of one kind or other, may not be acceptable to the awakening erstwhile slaves. The sacrifice of humanness may not go on forever.

I admit that few men have risen to become Gods in our transitional age. Humanity in the mass faces the institutionalised violence of the modern state, omnipotent even when it professes participation of peoples. And every new Spartacus fails, because the state refuses to wither away. The old authoritarianism of the Egyptians, the Romans, the Chinese and Indian feudalists, comes back. The fascist slogan commands like the ancient patriarchs 'to believe, to obey, and to fight'. The new Dictators put up enemy dummys and announce 'Laser war' against their enemies. Bloody sacrifice of one mass against another is asked for by the new incarnations of Caesars. Only war can confer on the barbarian conqueror, the title of God. Never mind the cost in the possible death of all.

The failure of the neo-idealists is that they are too refined to look at the gift horses in the mouth, and to protest, because they rediscover themselves in a frozen art. They do not wish to include human cause (which includes political, social and psychopathic alienations), in polite fiction.

To be sure, creative arts reflect life in a mirror. But the concave mirror is also a mirror. And one does not always talk with one's own face in the mirror. The mirror is other people. The love of Narcissus for himself makes him feel he is a God: Others are not admitted as his kin. He alone is himself, his higher self, which means he has become God Almighty. Therefore he is no more human.

The novels about human beings need the author, and others, men and women and children in the whirlpool, where there are contrary impulses, clashing trends, doubts, misgivings, making life a river which flows sometimes caught in whirlpools and then rushing in waves towards the ocean. Each human being, as an individual, brings his own repressed culture and inner wishes, to express himself, through signs, broken speech and attitudes. His or her personal myth is born of facts and fantasies. In a novel there are elements which are indeterminate, particular and concrete. The contrary impulses reflect confusions. If the novelist liberates his characters, and they take charge of their own destinies, fiction may release their inner sentiments and feelings and action, remove the taboos of religion, or the state, and reveal their predicaments, which by themselves lift the burden of pain off the consciousness and make for transcendence, which is ecstasy.

The reader often says, then, on reading a genuine novel: 'Oh I too feel like Dostoevsky's Idiot, or Tolstoy's Natasha, or Prem Chand's Hori'.

The emptiness of ritualistic rhetoric has already given place to the sense of humanity in the significant novels of our age, through the liberation of love of life against death. The humanist novel speaks, in living speech, often in passionate frenzies, from the uprush of spirit to express itself. The new novel thus exorcises the monsters and terrors of dissolution from the hell on earth, made by people for each other. Sartre was right when he spoke, figuratively that 'Hell is other people'.

The novel is for the world's continuance. It is urged to express itself in uneasy syntax, in dim perspectives, and from the dim urges of those, who seek to break the shackles of serfdom imposed by the past. It is inspired by the urges for many freedoms, baulked [sic] by the demons of power. It is against the insults, injuries, deceits, lies, hypocrisies, the mortifications and murders, brought by the oppressors of the world.

The protest novel is the source of renewal of the human person.