Mulk Raj Anand was born in a Hindu family of Kshatriyas on 12 December 1905 in Peshawar, the central city of Northwest Frontier Province, now in Pakistan. He was the third of five sons of La1 Chand, a silversmith turned sepoy. Anand's father belonged to the Thathiar caste. People of Thathiar caste were workers of copper and silver. Lal Chand left his hereditary occupation to attend school. He learnt English, took a British military examination and served in cantonments including Sialkot. Ferozepur, Peshawar, Mian Mir, Nowshera and Malakhand. He was appointed a head clerk, attached to the Thirty-eighth Dogra Regiment. He was said to be the only literate man in the whole regiment. He was a worldly man, highly ambitious for his sons' education and economic status. As an Arya Samaji, Anand's father also served as president of the Nowshera Samaj from 19 10 to 19 13. ~s'the society incurred the hostility of the British Officials for its rebellious activities, Lal, fearing the displeasure of his superiors and the British rulers in India, withdrew from the group Mulk Raj Anand inherited from his father a professional artisan's industry and minute attention to detail as also the revolutionary temperament.

Anand's mother came from a devout Sikh peasant family of Sialkot, a part of Central Punjab. She was a religious woman who had a great faith in orthodox beliefs. She had a vast knowledge of folk tales, having heard them in her childhood from her own mother, as also legends, fables, myths and other narratives of gods, men, birds and beasts. "So sure was my mother's gift for storytelling," says Anand, "that sometimes I found myself rapt in her tales with an intensity of wonder."

The first twenty years of Anand's life seem to have been spent in the Punjab area after passing his matriculation in 1920, Anand entered Khalsa College, Amritsar. He joined non-violent struggle against the British government and courted arrest. His early recollections focus on two cantonments, Mian Mir and Nowshera In 1925. he graduated from Punjab University with Honours in English. The first break in Anand's life came when he received a scholarship for research in philosophy under Professor Dawes Hicks in London. It is here that he started creative writing. In 1926, he completed dissertation on the thought of great philosophers: John Locke. George Berkeley, David Hume and Bertrand Russell. In- 1928, he was awarded Ph D degree by London University. He then associated with T.S. Eliot's literary periodical The Criterion.

LITERARY CAREER

Mulk Raj Anand enjoys the reputation of being a pioneer novelist because of a corpus of creative fiction of sufficient bulk and quality. He is a prolific writer and is continuing to write and publish at the age of ninety-six. Besides novels and short stories, he has written a number of books on art, paintings and literature.

Anand became an exciting name with his early novels untouchable (1935), Coolie(1936) and mo Leavesand a Bud (1937) in which he started the new trend of realism and social protest in Indian English fiction. In his novels, he portrays the1 doomed lives of the downtrodden and the oppressed. His protagonists-a sweeper, a coolie, a peasant - are all victims of exploitation, class- hatred, race-hatred and inhuman cruelty. Over the years, hand has become a vigorous champion of the oppressed and the downtrodden.

Untouchable, a powerful novel, can be regarded as quintessential Anand since it projects most of his characteristic concerns and fundamental issues of life. The main theme of the novel is untouchability as a problem in Hindu society.

In 1939- 1942, hand wrote a trilogy, a series of three novels dealing with the same protagonist called La1 Singh. The novels were titled The Village (1939), Across Black Waters ( 1940) and The Sword and the Sickle (1942).

In 195 1, he published Seven Summers, the first of a'series of seven novels which anand planned to write as a kind of autobiography in seven parts, corresponding to the seven stages of a man's life as described by Shakespeare in his play As Yozc Like It. Morning Face, the second of the seven novels in the series, was published in 1968 and received the Sahitya Akademi Award for 1971 . This has been followed by Confession ofa Lover (1 976), Bubble (1984), Little Plays ofMahatma Gandhi (1 990) and Nine Moods of Bharata ( 1999).

Besides novels, Mulk Raj hand has written more than seventy short stories which have been published in various collections entitled The Lost Child and Other Stories (1934), The Barber's Trade Union and Other Stories (1944). Corn Goddess and Other Stories (1947), ReJections on the Golden Bed and Other Stones (1953), The Power of Darkenss and Other Stones (1959), Lajwanti and Other Stones (1966) and Between Tears and Lnzcghter (1973). In addition, he has retold older Indian tales in two collections: Indian Fairy Tales (1946) and More Indian Fairy Tales (1961).

In 1952, hand was awarded the Internatioilal Peace Prize of the World Peace Council for promoting peace among the nations through his literary works. In 1967, he was awarded the Padma Bhushan by the President of India for disticguished service to art and literature. In 1978, he Non the E.M. Forster award of Rs.3000 for his novel Confession ofa Lover which was adjusted the best book of creative literature in the English Language.' This was the first annual award instituted by MIS Arnold Heinemann.

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