Mulk Raj Anand: anticolonialism and abjection

This chapter takes as its starting point Mulk Raj Anand’s literary interest in what he describes as “earthiness”, and argues that it is neither a simplistic yardstick of social realism, nor simply a derivation of Anglo-American modernism, but something in between, something different, and perhaps something more. In common with many of the other chapters in this volume, I make the case that Mulk Raj Anand was neither a modernist nor a realist, and that for a more satisfactory evaluation of Anand-the-novelist, we need to follow an entirely different literary tradition. Focusing on the dirtiness and squalor that is present in much of Anand’s writing, I argue that Anand deploys this trope to make the novel into neither a realist depiction of the world, nor a disaffected, alienated exercise in aestheticism, but as a vehicle to explore what it might mean to be modern, what it might mean to be anti-colonialist and what it might mean to be nationalist.