Poetics of progressive feeling: The visceral aesthetics of Mulk Raj Anand

Abstract

Mulk Raj Anand is perhaps best known for his pioneering roles in the development of the Indian English novel, and as a founding member of the Marxist anti-colonial movement, the All-India Progressive Writers’ Association, in the 1930s. Via an examination of an obscure and largely forgotten experimental Anand short story, Lament on a Death of A Master of Arts, this article revisits his most famous novel, Untouchable, through an emphasis on the poetics of touch and sensation. It argues that there lies, latent in Anand’s realist engagements with the emergent national consciousness, a particular aesthetic investment in the visceral sensibilities of the colonized subject. Foregrounding his participation in the Progressive Writers’ movement, it contends that the question of what would define realist literature as “progressive” for Anand and the Progressive Writers in a decolonizing India brings to light the group’s dynamic aesthetic grapplings with revolutionary feelings and the revolution of feeling.

Keywords:

• Mulk Raj Anand
• Untouchable
• visceral
• affect
• aesthetics
• All-India Progressive Writers’ Association

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. For more on the Progressive Writers’ Association, see Gopal (2005), Pradhan (1985), Coppola (1974), Anjaria (2012), Ahmed (2009) and Zaheer (2006).

2. As Priyamvada Gopal (2005) notes, “The dismissal of the Progressive legacy in some influential quarters resonates with a wider disavowal of Marxism within literary theory and postcolonial studies as ‘economistic’ or ‘deterministic’” (4).

3. See Ulka Anjaria (2012, 5) on the PWA recognition that the real world being represented was dominated by contradictions and ambivalence.

4. See Jessica Berman (2009) and Ben Conisbee Baer (2009) for modernist readings (character focalization, attention to the sensory and psychological experience of the everyday, the “day in the life” structure of Mrs Dalloway and Ulysses); Kristen Bluemel (2004) on Anand’s “inter-modernism”; and Mufti (2007) and Anjaria (2012) on his social realism in the colonial context.

5. Toral Jatin Gajarawala reads Untouchable as a key text within the development of Dalit literature because it foregrounds the central question of Dalit consciousness, and attempts to articulate “an explicit political awakening” (2014, 68).

6. See Ulka Anjaria (2012, 68) and Baer (2009) on the novel’s ambivalent conclusion.

7. See Kristen Bluemel (2004, 84) on the gendered limitations of Anand’s “intermodernism”.

8. Anjaria (2012) argues that the single-day structure of the novel becomes the site through which a classical realist emphasis on contingency (Bakha’s wanderings as internally driven) is metanarratively disrupted by an omniscient narrator who attempts to fix the events of Bakha into broader signifying fields – that is, to allegorize the subaltern subject for the nation (61).