SOURCE: "Western Ideology and Eastern Forms of Fiction: The Case of Mulk Raj Anand," in Asian and Western Writers in Dialogue: New Cultural Identities, edited by Guy Amirthanayagam, The Macmillan Press, 1982, pp. 142-58.

[In the following essay, Harrex focuses on theme and structure in Anand's fiction, noting a close relationship between form and moral-social ideology.]

Any discussion of the formal and technical aspects of Mulk Raj Anand's fiction necessitates consideration of Anand's intentions, attitudes and themes. Anand explores aspects of the human condition, mainly Indian, from the point of view of certain assumptions; his stories, characters and themes evolve out of the interactions of these assumptions with mirror images of 'real life'; his dramatisations of these interactions constitute a quest for a coherent world view. I would further postulate a close correlation between this quest for ideological structure and his quest for the fictional form most compatible with his instincts and prejudices as a writer.

Whether the ideological pursuit initiates, or takes precedence over, the formal pursuit (or vice versa) is difficult to determine, though I suspect that in most of his novels Anand has taken the view that form should be subservient to content. Investigation of Anand's philosophical ideas, both in his fiction and non-fictional prose, including letters, prompts me to offer the theory (and the present essay is based on it) that for Anand the Marxist-socialist pursuit of the proper (i.e. humanist) social structure and his own fictional pursuit of the appropriate verbal structure, if not virtually one and the same, are complementary aspects of a single purpose.

Anand is a serious and moral writer because he sees the salvation of mankind as dependent on the humane, compassionate, loving, lasting fulfilment of this single purpose. His viewpoint, or ethical base, is cosmopolitan—Indian, anti-Brahmin, this rather than other world-oriented. Perhaps the ultimate form of fiction which he has attempted to write might be described as the socio-political messianic novel.

The close correlation between formal narrative problems and moral-social questions to which I have alluded is clearly illustrated in the structure of Anand's first novel, Untouchable. Here, the initial problem of the writer, in the context of literary technique, and that of the reformer, in the social context, are identical: how to perceive experience from the untouchable's point of view, how to enter such an alien individual and caste consciousness? At this level, then, the writer and social worker are as one; both are 'committed', though for many writers this type of commitment may be a largely subconscious process. In Anand's case the commitment is quite conscious, and I see nothing counter-art in it, providing story is not turned into diatribe, nor propaganda promoted under a veneer of literary method. A conscientious desire not to succumb to these pitfalls of commitment, it is fair to say, has been a motivating element in Anand's quest for structures.

This quest, however, has been influenced not simply by Anand's belief that the twentieth-century novelist should be a responsibly committed writer, but by a complex of factors, included among which are the following: Anand's philosophy of Marxist Humanism; his conception of the authorial self as a dual personality combining the social observer's detachment with the revolutionary zeal of the romantic prophet figure; his technique of self-projection (notably through the invention of characters who act as spokesmen for his own ideas) whereby the objective social-realist form can accommodate much of his own 'felt experience', the subjective life of dream, the autobiographical moment; his effort to define form and technique in terms of idiosyncratic concepts like 'Indian expressionism', 'the desire image', 'neorealism', 'poetic realism', 'new myth versus old myth', and 'the body-soul drama'; and, lastly, his attempt to fuse the Western realist tradition of the novel with the Indian tradition of the moral fable.

An analysis of Anand's formal and technical achievement, accordingly, may logically begin with the Anand terminology and philosophical background, out of which Anand's fictions have evolved and taken shape. A reading of Apology for Heroism, which Anand describes as an 'Autobiography of Ideas', indicates that Anand's stories are, but not exclusively, dramatisations of these mainly Marxist-humanist ideas. In Apology, Anand makes clear his own sense of identification with the 1930s criteria of commitment, particularly social responsibility, humanistic idealism and a requirement that the novel change man and thereby society—though he was also conscious that too inflexible a commitment to the 'age of concern' could dehumanise literature:

… in the Thirties social problems tended to supersede the problem of the individual in literature. The old 'Fates', 'God', 'Evil in man' and 'Nature', almost gave place to the new 'Fates', 'Economics' and 'Politics' as they affected the 'Common Man', though … the intellectual concept tended to dominate imaginative literature and made for abstractions in poetry and fiction. (Apology for Heroism)

Here Anand hints at one of the problems he himself faced in seeking a fictional form which would enable him to convey his ideas about the situation of the common person (Bakha, Munoo, Ganga, Lal Singh, Ananta, Gauri) without turning that person into an intellectual abstraction.

Relevant to this problem, as recorded in Apology for Heroism, was Anand's experience of a crisis of belief and identity which was to become one of the dominant motives or themes of Indo-Anglian literature, a conflict between the traditional self and the modern ego, between the Indian Absolutist interpretation of the cosmos and the relativist interpretation of scientific Marxism, between ideals of submission and social justice:

This negative tradition tended to pull all my newly-acquired ideas askew … apparently, a man who docilely accepted his position within the framework of traditional Hindu caste society, however low and humiliating that position, was a good citizen, whereas those who consciously questioned tradition and suffered unwillingly were moral lepers. Everyone was born to his position and had to accept his lot through the cycle of birth to rebirth. Except, of course, that you had the right to ask the eternal questions and to see yourself as part of Reality, even though you could not alter your position in the every-day world of appearances. So that you remained a frantically agitated, impetuous, fictional being trying to realize that you were capable of being filled with God and thus seeking to become one with the omnipotent, omniscient, all-pervading free spirit, the Absolute above, but really consigned to the iniquities of hell on earth, without a hope of bettering yourself. So this was man!

This view, resulting from the attempt to resolve the tension of personal identities through 'a rediscovery of Indian ideals' (Apology), had its correlative in Anand the writer as he sought a fusion of Indian and Western forms of creative expression to match the philosophy he wanted to advocate. He named his form 'poetic realism', and we can legitimately name his philosophy Socialist Humanism.

The line of argument can be better understood if we dovetail into it further statements from Apology for Heroism. Thus:

The problem then, that I tried to face as a writer was not strictly a private, but a private-public problem … the introduction into creative narrative of whole new peoples who have seldom entered the realms of literature in India. And experience becomes an attempt at poetry even though the result is a somewhat ragged rhythm … there is a great deal to be said for this approach, which I may call the flight of winged facts, to poetic realism.

Anand saw his 'poetic realism' as a 'synthesis' of 'bifurcated' Western schools of literature, namely subjective formalism and 'social realism', neither of which singly could engage and portray the 'whole man'. Thus:

Though I believe in realism, I am, as I have said, for a poetic realism. I would like, for instance, to stress the importance of the desire image, or the romantic will, in writing, and I stand altogether for art against literary photography. And just as I found myself on a synthesis of the values so far bifurcated in Europe, just as I desired … a view of the whole man, in order that a new kind of revolutionary human may arise, so I have been inclined to stress the need for a truly humanist art commensurate with the needs of our time. (Apology)

Anand proceeds to argue that the artist, by emphasising the 'revolutionary aspect of art' (Apology), improves or intensifies life through '"creative myth", so as to change life in the deeper centres of other people's experience' (Apology):

Only, there is a living myth and a dead myth, and the desire image, which is the basis of revolutionary romanticism, must be really creative and must help men to integrate in society and not provide a formula for escape. (Apology)

Here we see in summary, by way of extrapolation, Anand constructing a dialectic involving subjective form and objective realism, the old myth of Vedanta and the new myth of Marxian 'individuation', which is to culminate in a poetry of revolutionary humanism. This connection between form and ideology bears the impress of much Marxist literary theory that was current in the 1930s, and particularly as expounded by Christopher Caudwell in Illusion and Reality (1937):

The full understanding of the mutual interpenetration of reflexive movement of men and nature, mediated by the necessary and developing relations known as society, is the recognition of necessity, not only in Nature but in ourselves and therefore also in society. Viewed objectively this active subject-object relation is science, viewed subjectively it is art….

Proletarian art in realising itself will become communist art. This process is simply a parallel in the sphere of ideology to what will take place in the sphere of material economy.

For Anand, too, the literary expression and the ideological theory are complementary aspects of a single purpose. Anand would seem to require that he be judged as a writer according to how successfully he fulfils the Marxist requirements of the artist. His romanticism (or desire image) is equivalent to the species of Utopianism whereby Marxists idealise the deterministic end-product of the socio-economic dialectic: the image of a just society in which the state will wither away. Or, as Anand puts it, the new myth of love (brotherhood) and the ethic of a new humanism ('revolutionary romanticism') will fulfil both the corporate and individual dream as a result of a 'struggle for the deepest socialism and the deepest human personality' (Apology). Some years after making this statement Anand continues to assert:

I would like to prove that a new contemporary myth (of growth to awareness) of the whole potential man is possible, as against the myths of Ramayana and Mahabharata … it is possible to have a contemporary myth. (Author to Critic: The Letters of Mulk Raj Anand, ed. with an Introduction and Notes by Saros Cowasjee, 1973)

What I have tried to demonstrate, to this point, is that Anand's theory of fiction was influenced by his exposure to Western ideas. The subject of his fiction, however, is not intellectual cross-currents in Europe, but India as experienced by the Indian. Because he saw the core problem of India to be the crushing weight of the allegedly 'dead myth' of 'neo-Hinduism' and Vedantic Absolutism, he reacted at first by expressing himself in a fictional form derived from Western literary theory rather than traditional Indian sources. As such, understandably, Anand gained a reputation as a social realist; but it was a reputation he was to become increasingly unhappy with. First, because he felt the Indian quality of both his work and sensibility was undervalued or neglected; second, because he sought a balance between Western and Indian structures of expression, especially as the identity crisis could not be resolved through the adoption of an extreme position, either Anglophile or Eastern, and moreover his increasing recognition of the deficiencies of Western societies coincided with a revived sense of positive values within the Indian tradition; third, because in aiming at balance through a fusion of Indian fable and European realist novel, Anand, I believe, was coming to terms with a tendency to contradiction within himself (ambivalent responses to East and West, tradition and modernity) despite the fact that the primary pattern of his worldview remained anti-traditional and Marxist-humanist.

This last development includes various announcements that his commitment involved a crucial element of romanticism in his vision, and was strengthened by the presence of an indigenous Indian response to life, which he refers to as 'the body-soul drama'. Thus:

Critics around me conceive literary realism as the description of the world as it is. I was born a Hindu and, therefore, I have never taken appearances for reality … I wished to write about human beings who were not known or recognised as human at all, or admitted into society—such as the outcastes … by going below the surface to the various hells made by man for man with an occasional glimpse of heaven as the 'desire image'. I have never been objective, as the realists claim to be. And my aim is not negative, merely to shock but to stimulate consciousness at all levels.

There was no tradition in the Indian novel for this. And being of the thirties, I was mistaken for a proletarian writer, a social realist. This is nonsense … I do not believe in the scientific novel or documentary. I never abandoned human beings in order to pursue a theory … I admit that this has led to a certain formlessness, but look for the fantasies in the labyrinthine depths of degradation and you will find them there. Perhaps much better than in Kipling … I wanted to create in Coolie a boy in all his humaneness, as against the fantastic Kim. (Author to Critic)

I rely on my subconscious life a good deal … and allow my fantasy to play havoc with facts. I believe all of us Indians are expressionists, that is to say, we enact a body-soul drama in everything we write … (Author to Critic)

I do not like naturalism. I have consciously, and unconsciously, written as an Indian expressionist; this expressionism is traditional with us, imaginative dramatisation … at the risk of exaggeration … The problems of machine exploitation, Victimhood, unfulfilled potentiality, are tackled in defence of innocence against the evils of the profit system of the west, in the spirit of William Morris and Ruskin and Gandhi. Romanticism is here as in Rimbaud more prophecy than acceptance—the desire image is important. (Letter to S. C. Harrex, 23 Oct. 1965)

These and similar statements reveal Anand fiercely defending his authorial self-image, but I am not sure that he has done himself justice in some of his reactions to what he regards as inaccurate criticism. Perhaps as a result of over-reacting in spur-of-the-moment statements to charges that his novels are largely didactic documents, and given that he is both an energetic thinker and talker as well as a prolific writer, he has understandably enough been unable to maintain an entirely consistent position. Thus, for instance, in one letter to Saros Cowasjee, he comments 'I believe the old myth lingers in the form of romanticism' (Author to Critic), thereby contradicting his usually approving use of the term 'romanticism', as when he maintains that the 'success' of 'humanism' 'lies in the implied romanticism.' On the whole, such discrepancies are unimportant, superficial.

When, however, we examine Anand's doctrine 'body-soul drama', on the basis of which (as we have seen) he defines himself as an Indian expressionist, not a social realist, we discover that Anand's expressionism is not exclusively Indian; that in fact it has evolved out of the Marxist argument, as becomes apparent if you compare the following statement by Anand with that previously quoted from Caudwell:

The body is mind, the mind body. There is no god. And the dialectical connections in almost all human activity result both in the knowledge we have of the world and the insights we occasionally derive. The world of knowledge is the sphere of philosophy and science. The world of insight belongs to literature and the creative arts, especially to poetry. The compulsion of curiosity, the desire for communication, and the necessary expression, are derived from the same source in both books of knowledge and books of passion. But while factual truth eliminates metaphor more and more, the creative truth depends more and more on the imagination which likens one thing to another … there is a deeper meaning in my theory of knowledge and metaphysics, and there is a coherence in the psycho-physical or psycho-social use of the terms 'body' and 'soul'. The dialectic is just popularly called drama. (Author to Critic)

Here, then, is evidence that in his quest for form Anand has Indianised a Western materialist structure derived largely from Marx (perhaps via Caudwell), and has tried to find for this structure, applied to Indian conditions, an alternative to the social-realist mode of expression which, in the West, has been the dominant methodology of fiction. This may explain why, even as early as Untouchable, Anand sought to heighten or intensify his representation of Indian life by setting it within a literary structure which was a version of moral fable.

At this stage of the argument, I offer two points on Anand's behalf. First, that to trust entirely the teller who maintains 'I would not consider myself a social realist because I have never professed a doctrine of that kind' (Letter to S. C. Harrex, 24 June 1965), and not the tale (e.g. Untouchable, Seven Summers, The Sword and the Sickle), is to diminish one of Anand's considerable achievements in Indian fiction. Accusations like 'communist' and 'propagandist', which have caused Anand to think of Naturalist and Realist as pejorative terms, are reduced to irrelevance by the fact that Anand, using conventional techniques of realism, has opened up a vast subject area of Indian life which had been neglected in literature prior to Anand's 1930s fiction.

My second proposition in defence of Anand is that the charge of didacticism levelled against him often ignores a difference, or disparity of cultural assumptions, underlying Indian and English canons of criticism; a disparity indeed which has culminated in the ironic spectacle of the Eastward-looking Marxist critic seeking to reverse the anti-didactic tradition of his Western critical heritage, at the same time as the Indian critic is revolting against the native tradition of didactic aesthetics. If, then, it can be shown that Anand adapted the Indian tradition of fable (which assumes that art and didacticism are not incompatible), I fail to see that this experiment in itself is aesthetically or technically objectionable. Deficiencies of execution, examples of which are to be found in Anand's writing, are another matter.

As this first half of my argument is a theoretical prelude to a discussion of Anand's technique of structuring his vision within individual novels, I believe it appropriate to conclude this section of the essay with two statements from Anand which reveal his strengthening conviction that his story-teller role was fabulist and folk-oriented:

… 'expressionism', by which I mean the typically Indian creative attitude of staging the body-soul drama as in the folk-literature … My 'realism' is only superficially like that of the West-European. Deep underneath, all the characters search for their human destiny in the manner of the heroes of our forest books. (Author to Critic)

… while accepting the form of the folk tale, specially in its fabulous character, I took in the individual and group psychology of the European conte and tried to synthesise the two styles. And thus I sought to create a new kind of fable which extends the old Indian story form into a new age, without the overt moral lessons of the ancient Indian story, but embodying its verve and vitality and including the psychological understanding of the contemporary period. (Preface, Selected Stories, 1955)

In his first novel, Untouchable (1935), Anand created a formal model which went further towards realising the type of structure his philosophical disposition required than he was perhaps capable of appreciating at the time. Obviously, the circumstances in which the novel came to be written are relevant to his attempt to produce a form appropriate to his ideas and feelings as projected into the largely fictionalised situation of the largely fictional protagonist, Bakha.

Anand had previously written a two-thousand page 'confession' which, by all accounts, was amorphous in form. This confession was the embryo of the 'seven ages of man' sequence of autobiographical novels beginning with Seven Summers, a sequence which, given the style of Morning Face, encapsulates personal history in a sort of free-verse prose stream that externalises the recollection process. Untouchable, too, grew out of segments of the original 'confession', and Anand was conscious that, if he was to communicate the novel's social issues effectively, he needed a tighter structure than was permitted by a linguistic 'expressionism' which operated like a whirlpool or expanding gyre. I admit that Anand has taken the view that the writer may have to sacrifice formal effectiveness in the interests of 'soul drama':

The novel is a form too amorphous to be controlled precisely. The relative merits of a book, from an author's point of view, may lie in his feeling of how much he was able to express of the soul drama, and at how many levels. Perhaps, in this point of view I would consider Untouchable to be a more intense work than the others. (Author to Critic)

Despite this assumption, in writing Untouchable Anand engaged in 'the intolerable wrestle' with amorphousness, presumably in the belief that, whereas the fluid form was appropriate in novels of purely subjective experience, when an objective interpretation of reality was to be attempted a formal balance of private and impersonal elements was necessary. The result was that in Untouchable, and later in The Big Heart, Anand reverted to a classical model: a prose-fiction structure shaped by the use of the 'three unities' technique. In thus facing the literary technical problem, Anand was simultaneously confronting the caste problem, the central subject in Untouchable. That is to say, he had an intuitive sense that the novel medium was amorphous in the same sense, correlatively speaking, that pre-Marxist society was chaotic. By 'imaging' reality in terms of the dramatic-unities technique, and by providing 'desire images' of change as well as a climax suggesting a potential structure to be adopted by society, Anand tackled the formal and ideological problems simultaneously and as one.

A further correlation in Untouchable between the formal discipline and the social theme, in the context of relating fact to fiction in accordance with the theory of commitment, derives from Anand's reliance on autobiographical experience, and his effort to incorporate it in the narrative data from the social environment. In 'The Story of my Experiment with a White Lie' (Indian Literature, Vol. X, No. 3, 1967), Anand informs us that Bakha is modelled on a boy he knew, and that the novel's compassionate viewpoint arose in part out of an incident when the untouchable

carried me home when I had been hit by a stone … without caring about what my mother would say about his having polluted me by his touch … I developed a guilt about him which compelled appeasement.

The episode is dramatically utilised in Untouchable and reappears in Seven Summers. Anand also reveals in the same article that, in order to acquire the right perspective on untouchability, he went to Gandhi's ashram to learn first-hand the Mahatma's 'harijan' philosophy of reform. The Mahatma apparently advised him to put himself in the Untouchable's place. Thus Anand cleaned latrines, while learning from Gandhi how to relate the self-discipline of Hindu idealism to social purpose. Perhaps this experience helped Anand resolve some of his formal difficulties as a budding novelist.

Whatever the cause, however, Anand succeeded in formulating a structure which satisfied his own idea of what he wanted to reveal and how. This structure, as I said earlier, involved the problem of defining the personality, consciousness, being, of the protagonist from the joint point of view of character presentation and social theme. At the beginning of the day of the novel, Bakha is natural man; the caste system has not as yet inculcated vice into his character. He is portrayed at work in the latrines, and the scene illustrates two concepts: the Gandhian principle that all work is ennobling, and a 'drama' of contrast between the 'body-soul' splendour of the youth and the unpalatable nature of his work. This work, though, is not to be despised because of its menial, sensory, natural characteristics, but because of the pernicious doctrine of caste with its vicious-circle identification of the work role—cleaning up dung—and the state of the outcaste's soul. Filth is to filth.

Out of this situation, Anand evolves a narrative pattern which combines the moral-fable form and the principle of 'interplay, indeed interpenetration, of situation and character', which Anand saw as the 'significant feature of the Western short story' (Indian Short Stories, edited by Mulk Raj Anand and Iqbal Singh, 1946). Present in Bakha's character is the pathetic incongruity of natural vitality sapped by conditioned docility. Then in the epiphany-like main 'touching' scene we see the interplay of character and incident producing the germ of a new consciousness in Bakha, beginning with a realisation of his social identity. The birth of this consciousness conforms to Gandhi's psychological approach to the problem of untouchability, whereby the outcast is encouraged to develop selfesteem in place of self-abasement. From this point on, the narrative development—involving as it does Bakha's increasing enlightenment regarding work, social discrimination, poverty and the doctrine of pollution—fulfils the requirement of the moral fable: the evil of the social system has been exposed, and the novel concludes with a 'desire image' suggesting how the evil should be eradicated.

Bakha experiences the 'shock' of self-recognition: 'It illuminated the inner chambers of his mind…. A shock … had passed through his perceptions, previously numb and torpid' (Untouchable). After this experience Bakha is developed into something of a fable figure, and is endowed with an elementary visionary quality. He has the ability to contrast the familiar with the unknown and this is described in terms of 'the impulse which tries to create a new harmony':

… he had grown out of his native shoes into the ammunition boots he had secured as a gift. And with this and other strange and exotic items of dress, he had built up a new world, which was commendable, if for nothing else, because it represented a change from the old ossified order … He was a pioneer in his own way …

Having thus far opposed the two elements ('ossified order', 'impulse … to create a new harmony') in the dialectical narrative structure, Anand employs two devices to bring Bakha to the brink of a personal and social Hegelian synthesis. The first device is the 'desire image'. As Anand has pointed out, the ending of Untouchable is conceived as a 'prophecy' 'suggesting a choice of possibilities' (Christ, Gandhi, Marx, the machine) because of his belief that the writer who does not have a romantic as well as realistic point of view will not see the whole of life and will be in danger of affirming only 'the negation of life':

The novel of revolutionary romanticism … seeks the desire image, that is to say to suggest what the writer would like life to be like, by implication, as against what it is … ('The Story of my Experiment with a White Lie')

The second device Anand uses to promote his social vision is the spokesman figure, the young poet, who is introduced in the final scene and explains the 'choice of possibilities' to a section of the crowd that includes the receptive Bakha. The poet reveres Gandhi as 'the greatest liberating force of our age', but suggests that India 'has suffered for not accepting the machine'. If Untouchable can develop a consciousness of self-respect and India adopts the flush-system, then untouchability may be eradicated. Structurally, this conclusion is reached through a coalescence of desire image and spokesman devices.

The device of the spokesman, discussed above, was for Anand a means of satisfying two distinct inner urges; thus he projected into the novel an image of the desired reality and an imagined connection between himself as the reformist spokesman-author and the underprivileged on whose behalf he was writing fiction. The device is reincarnated in the final scenes of Coolie (1936) in the person of Mohan, a revolutionary intellectual, who says 'come with me and we shall kill the landlord one day, and get your land', and who at the end clutches the dying Munoo's hand thereby signifying that, despite the tragedy of the past, its victim dies briefly united to a potentially regenerate future. In Anand's third novel, Two Leaves and A Bud (1937), the Mohan figure has become a major character (De la Havre), indicating that in this work Anand regarded the fable element as equally important as the portrayal of the peasantry and the exposé of corrupt imperialism.

The 'desire image' and self-projection techniques are most completely synthesised in The Big Heart (1945), in which the spokesman figure is again a poet, and undoubtedly Anand's ideal of himself. The hero of the novel, Ananta, is a spontaneous roguish Adam whose generous character is evident in his favourite saying: 'There is no talk of money, brother; one must have a big heart'. The poet sees in Ananta the foundation of the new modern man. However, it is the poet who articulates the humanism which the hero enacts:

I believe in the restoration of man's integrity … the reassertion of man's dignity, reverence for his name, and a pure love for man in all his strength and weakness, a limitless compassion for man, an unbounded love especially for the poor and downtrodden …

Thus Ananta embodies those qualities of the heart and the poet those of the head which in combination will create the new Adam of Anand's future society. The poet's discourses at the end of The Big Heart are not merely a choric comment on the tragic action: they are intended to leave the reader with the image of a desirable social form for which Ananta is a noble sacrificial prelude.

A new variation of the body-soul or character-author drama occurs in Private Life of an Indian Prince (1953), in which Anand projects himself into the Shankar role while modelling Victor on a Prince from real life and infusing into the portrait of Victor traumatic psychological experiences which Anand himself had undergone prior to writing the novel. Private Life, considered as a narrative structure, is Anand's most ambitious experiment with 'point of view'. Regarding this aspect of form, Anand has offered the following account of his intention and practice:

… the neutral character Dr. Shankar was invented to become Shiva's third eye and to burn out the dross, confusion and the chaos of emotions in order to achieve a certain balance…. If there is any alliance between myself and a character, it is with the narrator. But, always in my novels, the characters take charge. The novelist should try to become the great god, Brahma, who creates mankind, but is not responsible for it, that is to say, does not determine their destiny. Distance is very important in art, because art though like life, and reflecting it, is not life. (Author to Critic)

Shankar has clearly defined roles as character and narrator, and through him Anand attempts to achieve 'distance' by adopting from psychiatry the technique of clinical detachment. Thus when the doctor refers to Victor as 'an important case history for my files' he is speaking both as character and narrator. Shankar's prismatic analysis of Victor's condition is a point of view which combines Freudian and sociological techniques of analysis, further illustrating my contention that Anand in his fiction is constantly seeking a form in which literary and social models are subsumed into a single structure. Clinically, Shankar dwells on the unconscious, biological, sexual, Oedipal origins of Victor's neurosis. Sociologically, he diagnoses Victor as the product of historical circumstances in which princely tradition and modern morality were a destructive combination. Anand brings off some dark, dramatic effects by contriving Shankar as a kind of Poe narrator, who is custodian of a hunted psychotic's soul and witness to its Empedoclean disintegration. There is also in this 'secret sharer' situation an echo of the Conradian technique of narrative.

Shankar's fragmentary discourses, which at the end of the novel fill the narrative vacuum created by Victor's retreat into madness, are mainly reiterations of some of the main assertions in Apology for Heroism. Shankar advocates Anand's doctrine of humanistic vitalism and revolution—believed to be a product of historical necessity—as a therapeutic solution both to Victor's and society's afflictions. Shankar's criticism of non-attachment and mysticism, his dismissal of the crude distinction between a spiritual East and a materialistic West, his plea for 'the recognition of our responsibilities', his belief in man, in man as a homogeneity, not a 'bifurcation' of body and soul, in man as 'the final fact of the universe', are all attitudes which parallel exactly, at times even in phrasing, statements in Apology for Heroism.

An analysis of Anand's quest for structure, then, may fittingly conclude that Anand's fictional forms are allegorical representations (sometimes simple moral fables, sometimes mythic conceptions) of his social theories and philosophical ideas. Anand's trilogy—The Village (1939), Across the Black Waters (1940), The Sword and the Sickle (1942)—is his most comprehensive attempt to define through allegory, myth, fable and 'poetic realism' the meaning for India of the modern historical process. The hero of the trilogy, Lal Singh, evolves out of the world of traditional myth, of religious ritual and metaphysical powers, into the relativist universe of Anand's modern myths: the people, humanism, revolution, reason, human love.

In The Sword and the Sickle this new mythos replaces the ancient mythos which had provided a dance of death, Kali-Kalyug symbolic framework for Across the Black Waters. Quite early in The Sword and the Sickle Anand describes the 'new Fate' which replaced the 'old Fate' yet was equally 'cruel':

It was a Fate which seemed to him to have been working before the war … which had something to do with the school he went to, with the macadamised roads which had connected the village to the town for movement and transport, with miles of railways … with telephones without wires, and the war … it seemed to have been hidden behind the illusions to which he had aspired, behind the mirage of picturesque Vilayati farms and Sahibhood. But now from the corroded hearts of the people at home and his own bafflement, he had vague glimmerings of this new, inexorable Deity in the Pantheon of Indian Gods. It was disguised in the din and bustle of the cities … and in his own despair … he would know it and seek to master it.

The new Fate then is historical process according to Marx, and the new Kali is a hybrid Indo-British, bourgeois-capitalist, imperialist-landlord ogre. Anand's mythos has archetypal manifestations and values. Its classic incarnation, referred to reverentially, is the Russian Revolution; Marx, Lenin, Gandhi and Nehru are its epic avatars; it reveals with mythic certitude and folk simplicity the division between rich and poor; and it chants the poetry of humanism, proclaiming that 'love and understanding', not 'murder', is the 'way' to the 'imagined utopia'.

Lal Singh faces the classic modern choice of standing apart or being part of a cause, and as a protagonist in the abyss between past and present he is modern India personified, if not mythologised. He confronts the new world as Outsider, faces the choice of becoming an iconoclastic anti-hero or fulfilling the dharma of Self by losing self in the Absolute of the Marxist nirvana. Resolution is in favour of the latter, of what in fact is a modern transfiguration of the traditional Vedantic motive.

And finally, in this ultimate image of Lal Singh about to serve his stint in gaol, assured that the iron bars of illusion do not a prison of Reality make, absorbed into a consciousness greater than self, Anand defines how, in his quest for structures, he has Indianised literary and political models derived from the West, and Westernised traditional Indian values.