Mulk Raj Anand

This book, first published in 1933, was the first text on the general Hindu attitude to art. It sums up under the wider title of the Hindu view of art all such considerations – religious, philosophic, sociological, aesthetic and technical – as might be helpful for the understanding of Indian art.

This book, first published in 1933, was the first text on the general Hindu attitude to art. It sums up under the wider title of the Hindu view of art all such considerations – religious, philosophic, sociological, aesthetic and technical – as might be helpful for the understanding of Indian art.

The selection is an attempt to represent the wide range and variety of Mulk Raj Anand's short stories. The first group represents the stories of 'lyric awareness'. As in all poetry, the themes are elemental, such as birth and death, beauty, love and childhood, and the treatment often reveals a symbolic dimension added to realistic presentation.

Mulk Raj Anand's extraordinarily powerful story of an Untouchable in India's caste system, with a new introduction by Ramachandra Guha, author of GandhiBakha is a proud and attractive young man, yet none the less he is an Untouchable - an outcast in India's caste system. It is a system that is even now only slowly changing and was then as cruel and debilitating as that of apartheid. Into this vivid re-creation of one day in the life of Bakha, sweeper and toilet-cleaner, Anand pours a vitality, fire and richness of detail that earn his place as one of the twentieth century's most important Indian writers.'One of the most eloquent and imaginative works to deal with this difficult and emotive subject' Martin Seymour-Smith'It recalled to me very vividly the occasions I have walked 'the wrong way' in an Indian city, and it is a way down which no novelist has yet taken me' E. M. Forster

Coolie portrays the picaresque adventures of Munoo, a young boy forced to leave his hill village to fend for himself and discover the world. His journey takes him far from home to towns and cities, to Bomboy and Simla, sweating as servant, factory-worker and rickshaw driver. It is a fight for survival that illuminates, with raw immediacy, the grim fate of the masses in pre-Partition India. Together with Untouchable, Coolie places Mulk Raj Anand among the twentieth century's finest Indian novelists writing in English.