"Why Does the Child Cry" by Mulk Raj Anand

"Why Does the Child Cry" by Mulk Raj Anand  (1973, 12 pages-first published in The Illustrated Weekly of India)

Short Stories of the Indian Subcontinent

A Reading Life Project

Mulk Raj Anand

1905 to 2004

Mulk Raj Anand was a founding father of the Indian novel in English.    He was one of the first writers from India to gain an international readership in English.    Anand (1905 to 2004--Peshawar, India) after graduating from college in India went to England to receive his PhD.     While at Cambridge (the university of choice for Bloomsbury) he became friends with people like E. M. Forester  and George Orwell.   He was a passionate admirer of Gandhi and a strong supporter of the movement for Indian independence.    He was a friend of Pablo Picasso.    His literary output was very large including several novels, lots of poetry and numerous highly regarded short stories.   He was a strong force for good in the world.

I have already posted on four of Anand's wonderful short stories.   E. F. Forester helped him get his first novel, Untouchable, published in England and it is one of the great novels of the 20th century.   It has been compared to Dickens for its insight into to lives of the Dalits and I think if Anand had predated Dickens the comparison would be reversed.  

I was very glad to see a short story by Anand included in Best Indian Short Stories Vol I edited by Khushwant Singh.   The stories are from this nine year tenure as editor of The Illustrated Weekly of India.  During his editorship (1969 to 1979) it became a high prestige destination for Indian writers and published stories by some of the great writers of the subcontinent.  Publishing in The Illustrated Weekly of India was as prestigious as publishing in The New Yorker.  

"Why Does the Child Cry" , written originally in English, is the story of "Abdul Latif, the potter's son, was called Late Laff by everyone".   It is a terribly sad heartbreaking story about senseless cruelty and how the innocent victims suffer most in absurd wars.   Abdul is not mentally bright but he is very agile physically.  He is all over the village and everybody loves him.  He loves hunting birds and fishing with his friend Ali.   I know this story will be hard for those who do not have Singh's anthology to read so I will tell the conclusion.   One day Abdul comes home and finds his house destroyed, the runs through the village and their are dead bodies everywhere.   He has no understanding of the religious wars that were tearing apart the subcontinent.   He begins to runs through the village in a panic when he sees a tank, looking for his friend Ali who always helped him.   The scenes he sees are depicted with great passion and veracity.   This is a great story.

My "bottom line" on Mulk Raj Anand is to put The Untouchable, on your read in 2013 list.

I am writing this in participation in the Short Story Initiative of Nancy C of A Simple Clockwork.   This month the focus is on Indian Short stories.

Mel u

Untouchable by Mulk Raj Anand

Untouchable  by Mulk Raj Anand (1935, 161 pages, 206 KB)

There is no literary tradition with roots older than that of India.   I will always admire Edmund Burke (Anglo-Irish-1729 to 1797) for telling the English Parliament that England had no right to rule a country with a culture much older than their own.    

Mulk Raj Anand was a founding father of the Indian novel in English.    He was one of the first writers from India to gain an international readership in English.    Anand (1905 to 2004--Peshawar, India) after graduating from college in India went to England to receive his PhD.     While at Cambridge (the university of choice for Bloomsbury) he became friends with people like E. M. Forester  and George Orwell.   He was a passionate admirer of Gandhi and a strong supporter of the movement for Indian independence.    He was a friend of Pablo Picasso.    His literary output was very large including several novels, lots of poetry and numerous highly regarded short stories.   He was a strong force for good in the world.

I have already posted on four of Anand's wonderful short stories.   E. F. Forester helped him get his first novel, Untouchable, published in England.     The standard cliche, it is on the back of the paper-back edition I saw in a local bookstore, is that in the Untouchable Anand took on the role of the Charles Dickens of India in his amazing depiction of the life of a member of the very lowest class of all, the Untouchables.   Among Untouchables or Dalits, it it my understanding that there are 49 different sub-castes.  In 1935 and for thousands of years prior to then those of the very lowest class were cleaners of solid bodily waste, street sweepers, and those who removed the bodies of dead animals.   A person was born into this caste and nothing could be done to escape it aside from rebirth in a higher caste.

Untouchable is about one day in the life of an Untouchable,  a young man seemingly in his late teens or early twenties named Bakha.  It is a great book that belongs on any list of 100 best novels.  Anyone interested in colonial studies or the history of India who has not yet read this book really needs to do so as soon as they can.  It is also so wonderfully written that reading it is a pure joy.  The central character totally admires to the point of hero worship the occupying British troops.   Anand is simply brilliant in his depiction of the attitude of the central character to the British.   Bakha so wishes he could one day have a pair of long pants like the English sometimes wear and he dreams of somehow getting the wonderful job of being a "sweeper" for a British regiment.    

There are many very powerful moments in this story.   Bakha is treated very roughly by his father.  He admires very much his sister who has now taken over as the woman of the family since their mother died.   When the sister goes to the well to get water, she is not allowed to draw it directly for fear she will pollute the well.   She has to ask a higher caste person to draw it for her.  When Bakha walks down the street he is supposed to shout "sweeper, sweeper coming" so no one will have the horror of accidentally touching him.   His sister is at the marriageable age, which I am going to say 14 or so, and as she is attractive so  the father hopes she will fetch a good dowry.  

It was, according to my sources, common at the time for Untouchable women to clean the homes of Brahman priests and they would often seduce them into prostitution or simply rape the women with impunity.   Sometimes a "lucky" Untouchable woman might become the mistress of a higher class person and there are vague suggestions Bakha's mother was either a mistress or semi-prostitute also.  Bakha's sister is molested in a small way by a Brahman priest.

There is so much in this short novel.   I found it a near compulsive read.   There is a very interesting scene when a Christian missionary tries to convert  him and a very good seen when he and thousands of others go to hear Gandhi explain why idea of Untouchability is intrinsically evil.   I could feel how moved Bakha was when he heard Gandhi say that if he were to be reborn he would wish to return as an Untouchable.  

All of the action of the story takes place in one day.   The characters are all perfect.    

All literary autodidacts need to put this on their life time list.     It is not a hard  book at all.   It is beautifully written and the action is easy to follow.   

Untouchable is a deeply moving, profoundly wise book.   It may change how you view the world.

E. M. Forester wrote a preface to the book that is interesting if no longer politically correct.

Please share your experience with Anand with us.   

Mel u

Mulk Raj Anand-Two Brilliant Short Stories About Life in India Under the British Raj

"The Lost Child"   (1940, 5 pages)
"The Tractor and the Corn Goddess" (1938, 6 pages)

Two Short Stories by Mulk Raj Anand

A Pioneer Anglo - Indian Author

Indian Literature on The Reading Life

There is no literary tradition with roots older than that of India.   I will always admire Edmund Burke (Anglo-Irish-1729 to 1797) for telling the English Parliament that England had no right to rule a country with a culture much older than their own.    

Mulk Raj Anand was a founding father of the Indian novel in English.    He along with R. K. Narayan (on whom I have already posted), Ahmed Ali and Rajo Rao was one of the first writers from India to gain an international readership in English.    Anand (1905 to 2004-99 years-Peshanar, India) after graduating from college in India went to England to receive his PhD.     While at Cambridge (the university of choice for Bloomsbury) he became friends with people like E. M. Forester  and George Orwell.   He was a passionate admirer of Gandhi and a strong supporter of the movement for Indian independence.   His first novel, Untouchable (1935) brought him world wide acclaim as the Charles Dickens of India.   He was a friend of Pablo Picasso.    His literary output was very large including several novels, lots of poetry and numerous highly regarded short stories.   He was a strong force for good in the world. 

In April I read and posted on two of Anand's short stories, "The Price of Bananas" and "Old Bapu".   I really enjoyed both of these stories.   Anand's stories brought life in rural India during the reign of the Britisth Raj to life for me and as a bonus were very entertaining and beautifully written.   

"The Lost Child" is, I think, one of the most read and taught of Anand's short stories.    It is set at a religious festival celebrating Shiva.    The crowds are huge, overpoweringly large.    The people in the story are a married couple and their young son, maybe eight or so. The parents are devout followers of Shiva.  Like any child he wants everything   for sale by the many vendors.    In the crowd there are 1000s of devotees to Shiva dressed in ritualistically correct  Orange Robes.     There is a merry go round set up at the festival.   The boy is very attracted to it and runs to ride it.   I am assuming the merry go round is meant as a symbol for the wheel of life.   Every parents worst nightmare   happens (and this is in the days with no cell phones etc to track children).   I will leave the rest of the plot unspoiled.    Anand did a great job of making me feel  what it would be like to be at the festival.

"The Tractor and the Corn Goddess" is a fascinating story that tells us a lot about how the ordinary Indian felt about his English rulers and the coming of western technology to rural India.   I really liked the treatment of the conflict of Indian religious traditions and the British Raj.    It also shows the very conservative attitudes of many that in effect worked to keep the British in power.    I will tell a bit of the background setting and the plot but I really hope this story will be widely read.    As the story opens, the leading landlord in the area has died.    His oldest son, who has been in Europe studying (in theory!) and falling into what the residents of the area see as decadent ways is now the major land owner.    He proposes something very radical.   That he will give most of the land to a collective owned by the people who work the land.    The richer people in the area are all totally opposed to this idea and horrified by the suggestion of large scale social change.   The people in the area really get upset when the son buys a tractor.     Everyone is at first horrified by it and sees its plowing as a blasphemy toward the Corn God.    Also they are concerned with the long term implications for the livelihood of the people in the area when they learn it can do the same amount of plowing in one day that it would take 100 men using the traditional methods.     There is a lot in this story I have not relayed.

You can read both of these stories at Google Books.   Just do a search for Mulk Raj Anand:   A Reader and you can read both of these stories and a number more online.   

I hope to read in the not too distant future his two most famous novels, The Untouchable and The Private Life of an Indian Prince.   

Please share your experience with Anand.  Or any South Asian short story author!

Mel u