Prof. K.R. Srinivasa Iyengar , a scholar par excellence , wrote INDO-ANGALIAN LITERATURE ( 1943 ) , THE INDIAN CONTRIBUTION TO ENGLISH LITERATURE ( 1945 ) and INDIAN WRITINGS IN ENGLISH ( 1962 ) . These writings first time put light on the history of the INDO-ANGALIAN writings in a more comprehensive way . Before that E.F. Oaten in his book A SKETCH OF ANGLO-INDIAN LITERATURE ( 1908 ) considered Henry Derozio’s poetries as ‘ part of Anglo-Indian literature ‘ .
But the Indo-Angalian writings can be defined as a literature written in English by the person of Indian origin. So,it can clearly be understood that those English writings written by the English men or others cannot be termed as the Indo-Angalian writings as such. THE CAMBRIDGE HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE clearly enumerates Sarojini Naidu , Ravindranath Tagore, Sri Aurobindo Gosh etc as Indo-Angalian writers. Here we will study about only three such writers — Mulkraj Anand , R.K. Narayan and Raja Rao .
MULK RAJ ANAND
One of the pioneer of Indo-Angalian lieratures in India, Mulk Raj Anand was born in Peshawar on 12 December 1905 in a poor Coppersmith family. His schooling was done in Peshawar and later he was enrolled as a college student at Khalsa College at Amritsar and got a degree of graduation with honours in 1924 . He studied at Cambridge University, while working in restaurant and he was awarded Ph.D Degree in Philosophy in 1929 on the subject ‘ Betrand Russell and the English Empiricists ‘.
He was a humanitarian writer with compassion for poor and destitutes. His first novel UNTOUCHABLE (1935) depicted about the life of Bakha , a young sweeper , who was untouchable because of the fact that he used to cleanse latrins of other as a way of his survival. The aim was to eradicate caste system from India as such . His second novel COOLIE , which was published in 1936 , was again highly critical of the Caste system and the British rule in India. Here he tried to break , for the first time through his novel , the traditional way of life . The plight of fourteen year old boy MUNOO , the hero of his novel , was decimated due to poverty and exploitation in view of existing social and political order . Anand’s third novel was published in 1937 . By now he had become a well-known Indo-Angalian writer . His third novel TWO LEAVES AND A BUD is another one which clearly saw a struggle between haves and haves-not, a dichotomy persisted in the British India that time . Story is again reformative and revolutionary in character as to how in the tea garden of Assam a peasant struggled for protecting his daughter from the oppression of a British soldier. Mulk Raj Anand’s approach towards the downtrodden, destitute and poor had widely been acclaimed as such . His other works are : THE VILLAGE (1939) , ACROSS THE BLACK WATERS (1939) , THE SWORD AND THE SICKLE (1943) , THE BIG HEART (1945) and THE ROAD (1961) etc are a few of his writings which could be considered worthy mentioning . Once I have listened to him personally and physically in hall while in Bombay . A throughout left he was but I couldn’t understand why he was living in a posh area of Bombay like Cuffe Parade . This dichotomy I could not understand till now despite being a serious student of Politics and History both …..etc.
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