[In the following excerpt, Bald identifies traits common to all of Anand's novels, including a protagonist who highlights social injustice and a hero who espouses revolution.]

Mulk Raj's novels follow an identical pattern: each describes a principal figure who brings into focus the injustices of society; his abortive and misdirected attempts for a better life in the existing unjust state; and the appearance of the revolutionary hero, who shows him that realization of a good life is only possible after the destruction of the present order. The novels end on a note of hope in the anticipated Revolution. Though the milieu of the novels differs, the character of the message and of the messenger remains remarkably consistent.

The objective of initial failure is to sharpen the profile of the true revolutionaries, the messiahs. The false prophets or imposters come under the labels 'Terrorists' or 'Spontaneous Revolutionists', Gandhi the 'bourgeois saint', and those who offer religion as the Truth. [In a footnote, Bald adds: "see the role played by Kanwar Rampal Singh's gang in The Sword and the Sickle, Gandhi in ibid., and The Untouchable, and Colonel Hutchinson in The Untouchable."] They tempt the main characters by advocating 'wrong' action and raising false hopes.

The characterization of the messiah figures in all the novels is similar: virtues of traditional Hindu heroes appear combined with those of a Leninist hero. [In a footnote, Bald states that the virtues of traditional Hindu heroes are "self-control, asceticism, non-attachment to worldly goods and family ties, and an unmitigated devotion to the Truth."] The two types merge smoothly. Mohan (Coolie) is respected and admired by the rikshaw pullers because of his renunciation of the comfortable life: 'Rumor goes that … he has been to Vilayat (England) and is such a learned man … He comes from a high class family … He had an easy life in his childhood and youth. And now he is doing a sort of penance for his sins.' In contrast, Onkarnath, the Congressite trade unionist in Coolie, is a 'prim well-groomed man, dressed in a homespun silk tunic and silk dhoti … his eyes and brow wrinkled darkly near the edges of the expensive tortoise shell glasses. His lower lip is twisted into a sardonic contempt for everything but himself …' He lacks the simplicity of Mohan, the true revolutionary; unlike Mohan, he is a poor speaker, unable to evoke enthusiasm amongst the mill-hands for the Gandhian faith in negotiation with the mill-owners.

What Lallu (The Sword and the Sickle) notices about the revolutionary leader Sarshar is his asceticism: in contrast to Kanwar Rampal Singh's gang of pseudo-revolutionaries, who smoke the best cigarettes and drink imported liquor, Sarshar austerely smokes the cheap bidis. He possesses a 'demoniac devotion' akin to the Hindu ideal of bhakti. Sarshar radiates an aura of dedication, sincerity, self-sacrifice and austerity. Rampal Singh's group, on the other hand, is characterized by a light-hearted tomfoolery. Rampal Singh himself is described as an 'easygoing, loosely dressed, quick witted buffoon,' as if to describe his thought processes.

Mahatma Gandhi, seen through the eyes of Lallu, 'seemed to be full of himself, of his own spiritual struggles. And Lallu felt himself lapsing into listlessness, as if he were being suffocated by the deliberately exalted simplicity of this egoistic, confessional talk of self-perfection. He wanted to bring the Mahatma to a concrete decision. But the aroma of moral grandeur, purity, and simplicity that surrounded this place [Gandhi's quarters at Anand Bhavan] made him feel as if he were a huge uncouth figure with large legs and big paws in a glass palace.'

Puran Singh (The Big Heart) is called Bhagat by his followers, a traditional title for the devoted one. He is depicted as full of 'unselfishness and spirit of sacrifice … though he has renounced religion.' Revolution is his new 'religion'. Thus a pattern emerges: the advocates of Revolution are all men who come from the top, the privileged classes, they do not rise from the ranks. However, they 'renounce' their privileges to identify with the underprivileged, to devote themselves to the Cause and to spread the gospel of revolt among the masses. They are the politically active sannyasis (ascetics), and it is because they embody the virtues of the traditional leader that the masses hold them in high regard. One may well ask if the masses accept the leadership of Mulk Raj's messiahs because they fit the pattern of the ideal leader in the context of Hindu political culture or because of the nature of their message.

The Leninist vanguard theory of Revolution to which Mulk Raj Anand subscribed intensified the elitism of the Hindu 'superior born' leader. The result is disastrous. Anand's revolutionaries, though trying hard to be one with the people, cannot help emerging as superior human beings: they profess faith in Man and commitment to Man's integrity; however, they decide what is 'good' for man. In The Big Heart, Puran Singh declares '… a great deal of my belief in truth arises from my love and respect for man as such…. I believe in a restoration of man's integrity if he is to control machinery at the present time. I believe, in fact, if we can have any religious faith, morality or code at all today, it must arise from the reassertion of man's dignity, reverence for his name.' Yet he feels no betrayal of his beliefs when he agrees with his protégé, Ananta, that the coppersmiths are 'like children and … lack confidence…. They haven't been able to make up their minds, whether they hate machines too much to take jobs in the factories or whether they are really looking for jobs there. And we ought to make up their minds for them.' In Coolie, Mohan tries to identify himself with the rikshaw pullers by becoming a rikshaw man himself, but talks to the coolies as a superior; 'You fool,' he rebukes an indifferent coolie, 'You will let them [the exploiters, the landlords] kill you. You are all ignorant slaves. How can I drill any sense into your heads?' Sauda, the Trade Unionist, likewise uses abusive language to stir the workers in the cotton mills to strike:

Stand up for your rights, you roofless wretches, stand up for justice! Stand up you frightened swine. Stand up and fight! Stand up and be the men you were meant to be and don't crawl back into the factories like the worms that you are! Stand up for life, or they will crush you and destroy you altogether! Stand up and follow me! From tomorrow you go on strike and we will pay you to fight your battle with the employers! Now stand up and recite with me the chapter of your demands. (italics mine)

The charter is drawn up by the leaders without any consultation with the aggrieved parties. The workers are shamed into following the Trade Unionists. Sauda appeals to their feudal notion of izzat (honor), and their manliness: 'Would you let anyone throw away the turbans off your head?… Then where is your idea of izzat gone?' asks Sauda, 'Where is your sense of dignity? Where is your manhood?' Mutual respect between the leader and the led is entirely absent. One detects a contempt for the lowly and the under-privileged, a lack of confidence in the Revolution of the 'people'. The elites are dedicated to the revolutionary cause, they 'know' that Revolution is necessary and their job is to convince the ignorant masses of its necessity. Looking down on the masses does not produce any emotional or spiritual conflict in their minds.

Revolt against authority is the central theme of Mulk Raj's novels; it was also the theme of his relationship with his father, the symbol of authority in the household. He was fascinated by revolt, and treated it sometimes as an end rather than a means. However, along with this fascination for revolt is a preoccupation with authority leading him to replace existing father figures with the dictatorship of the Revolutionary leader, the messiah who would lead the 'people' to consciousness and revolt, speak for the poor and the downtrodden, and set up a 'paternalist State', to give tractors and fertilizers to the peasants, retaining the power to give or withhold.

Lallu, the central figure in Mulk Raj Anand's trilogy, accepts Revolution as a creed only after a series of rebellions in the village. As an adolescent [in The Village] he defies the mores of his Sikh village community by shaving his long hair, eating meat cooked by a Muslim, and flirting with the landlord's daughter. On being severely punished for his deviant behavior by the headman of the village, his father and his elder brothers, Lallu rejects familial and communal discipline. He runs away from home to seek liberation in the Army. Yet the Army is merely a replacement for the close-knit village community with its authoritarian superiors, which Lallu had rejected. After discharge from the Army he seeks commitment to authority in the elitism of Revolution.

Though the peasants of Nasirabad rebel against the landlord's insistence on forced labor, they derive courage to do so from the leadership of Kanwar Rampal Singh, a declassed landlord [in The Sword and the Sickle]. The peasants respect authority too much; and they accept it in the traditional manner of mai-bapism. They cannot repudiate one mai-bap (mother-father) without the security of another. Their mode of address for Rampal Singh is Maharaj (ruler), Huzoor (lord), or Sarkar, all servile in their connotations.

Lallu wants the state to 'redivide the land, create Sarkari (state) farms, and give every village a tractor or two, as Kanwar Sahib says they are doing in Roos' [The Sword and the Sickle]. Munnu (Coolie) wonders why 'the Angrezi Sarkar had not razed the old city and built (modern) shops and houses, and decorated them with tables and chairs'. Both assume that it is the duty of the state to do so. When, as a World War I sepoy, Lallu visits France, he is impressed by the French farmers' use of chemical fertilizers. Instinctively he exclaims [in Across the Black Waters], 'The Sarkar ought to invent [fertilizers] in Hind', and distribute them among the Indian peasants.

Puran Singh (The Big Heart) believes in 'bhakti, devotion … working for others'. After becoming an enlightened revolutionary, Lallu (The Sword and the Sickle) believes: 'as the bhagats, the devoted ones in the past practiced the "at your service" ideal of our religion, so we [revolutionaries] have to give, give, give of ourselves'. To both of them it is important to serve the poor, for 'he who gives himself to the service of others is blessed, is enriched'. This deep-seated belief in authority and paternalism is not only in keeping with traditional Indian political culture but also with the workings of the British Raj. Paternalist authority of the state is not questioned; what is questioned is the character of the men who wield it.

Mulk Raj's treatment of industrialism, though influenced by Marxism, possesses uniquely Indian ingredients. Industrialism itself is good; the machine is a hero except under capitalism, when it becomes a villain. Puran Singh: points out [in The Big Heart]: 'If you [the workers] have the controlling switch [power] in your hand, you can make the machine your slave rather than your master…. It is that switch or destruction.' Destruction involves loss of 'their manhood, the dignity of their place in the brotherhood, their sense of community'.

Mulk Raj points out how a sense of brotherhood existed in precapitalist India. It is present in his thathair community before the advent of the factory, in the village that both Mannu and Lallu leave, and even among the untouchables of Bakka's world. The coppersmiths address each other as 'brothers', and the severest and most effective punishment for the thathair turned factory owners and responsible for unemployment among the artisans, is social boycott of their household by the community [sic]. This proves especially effective at the time of weddings, when people refuse to contract marriage with a family thus boycotted. Ananta stresses to his coppersmith brethren: 'If we belong to hunger and suffering we belong to it together'. The sense of community of the coppersmiths is preserved by their living in the same Mohalla (area) of the town. Both Munnu and Lallu come from a close-knit village community. In the city for the first time oprhan Munnu [from Coolie] felt lonely; after taking the plunge of running away from home Lallu 'recognized himself, a pitiful figure, walking along the dusty highway alone, in the oppressive muzzy windless solitude of the land' [The Village].

It was to regain this feeling of community which was being threatened by the introduction of the concept of 'Mine' and 'Thine', that Mulk Raj launched his propaganda of the Revolution [in The Sword and the Sickle]: 'For Revolution is a need for togetherness, Comrade, the need to curb malice among men, the need for men to stand together as brothers …'. However, the community Mulk Raj was seeking was the recapture of an emotional security lost by the peasant-turned-laborer, or by the breakdown of the artisan caste brotherhood. It was not the Marxian philosophical community of the self with its creative essence, from which union followed the Marxist harmony between men. [In a footnote, Bald states: "Here I accept Robert C. Tucker's thesis (see his Philosophy and Myth in Karl Marx) that the only community Marx was concerned with was the community of the self: man with his external and internal human nature; this split of man's human nature was evident in the material world by the splitting of collective man into classes—the exploiter and the exploited. To Marx, self change, or Revolution, was to be the work of the fully alienated worker, the proletariat: 'emancipation of the workers contains universal emancipation' (Marx, Manuscripts of 1844)."] In spite of his apocalyptic tone and revolutionary zeal, Mulk Raj wanted to make a heretical transition, in the Marxian context, from the collectivism of the caste and village to the harmony of the revolutionary utopia. His revolutionary messiahs preach Revolution not to the wholly alienated proletariat, but to the unemployed artisans of The Big Heart who have never worked for the 'capitalists', the unskilled laborers of Coolie, and the peasantry of The Sword and the Sickle.

Somehow a Revolution was to solve everything: Mulk Raj's message is the urgency of effecting such a Revolution; his visions, the resurrection of man the day after the Revolution: '… let us make another effort to destroy those who do not love us'. 'Now is the time to live in and through the struggle…. Now is the time to change the world, to fight for Life and Happiness …' [The Sword and the Sickle] for 'Life makes a fresh start with every great change and overturning. And those who have lost faith and been degraded, disfigured and mutilated, become aware of their manhood, and rise to the full heights of their dignity, become men and learn to stand erect with their turbans on their heads …' [The Big Heart]. By one blow, overnight, the Revolution was to create new men who are whole individuals.

In the tradition of Marxist Revolutionists, Mulk Raj externalized the 'solitary, poor, brutish, nasty' Hobbesian man, placing him in the objective reality of institutional life or private property. Destruction of the corrupting institutions was to lead simultaneously to the emergence of tenderness, brotherliness and creativity in man: '… a "Revolution" after which men would find a new way of living in which they would discover a new brotherhood, away from the pettiness created by the miseries of the present, by the need of profit makers and the lust for power of the Sarkar …' [The Big Heart].

'Brotherhood' and 'manhood' are linked in Mulk Raj's post-revolutionary era; 'pettiness' and 'greed' with the present 'capitalist' age of profiteering. After the Revolution, Man realizes his essence as collective man in 'togetherness'; profit, greed, and egoistic need make man less human by placing barriers between man and man.