Not an ‘Extinct Volcano’

Mulk Raj Anand’s first novel Un­touchable was published in 1935. Anand, then a Bloomsbury intellectual, had writ­ten the first draft over a long weekend in 1930: ‘the book poured out like hot lava from the volcano of my crazed imagina­tion’. He revised the book after a short stay with Gandhiji in the Sabarmati Ashram, and returned to London to find a publisher. The novel was turned down by nineteen publishers. After Anand had contemplated suicide, the twentieth took it, because E.M. Forster offered to write a preface for it.Since the publication of Untouchable more than forty years back, Anand has not looked back. He has published fifteen novels, ten collections of short stories and several books on art, philosophy and culture. He has written three volumes of an auto-biographical novel called The Seven Ages of Man and has promised four more volumes. He also has about a hundred fables and short stories in his miscellaneous hoard which he hopes to refine into shape some time for publica­tion.

The first major critique of Anand’s work was the publication of Jack Lind­say’s The Elephant and the Lotus (1965). Other subsequent publications include C.D. Narasimhaiah’s The Swan and the Eagle (1969), Margaret Berry’s Mulk Raj Anand (1971), K N. Sinha’s Mulk Raj Anand (1972), and M.K. Naik’s Mulk Raj Anand (1973). Saros Cowasjee’s book is the latest and significant addition to the series.