The socialist writer and novelist Mulk Raj Anand was born in 1905 in Peshawar in present-day Pakistan and, like his coeval friend and long-lived writer Raja Rao, died almost one hundred years later, in 2004. His parentage provided a significant combination of loyalty and resistance to the British colonisers, generating some of the unresolved tensions informing Anand’s work. Indeed, while his father, a hereditary craftsman, was appointed head clerk in the British Indian regiment and was extremely loyal to it, his mother, of peasant origin, was often reported to challenge colonial ideology, referring to the British with notes of contempt and disdain.
The young Anand also had first-hand traumatic experience of some of the most brutal and public colonial violence carried out in the north of
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Citation: Alterno, Letizia. "Mulk Raj Anand". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 13 November 2012 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=105, accessed 23 November 2024.]
