Indian · 1905–2004
Mulk Raj Anand was born in Peshawar, the son of a coppersmith turned army clerk, and took a doctorate in philosophy at University College London. In Bloomsbury he worked for T.S. Eliot's Criterion and knew Forster, who wrote the preface to his first novel. He fought in Spain with the Republicans and returned to India in 1946. Anand wrote the first Indian English novels that made the poor their subject rather than their scenery: a latrine cleaner's single day in Untouchable, a boy sold into labour in Coolie, tea plantation workers in Two Leaves and a Bud. Publishers in London rejected Untouchable nineteen times before Forster's introduction carried it. He founded the art magazine Marg, edited it for decades, and received the Sahitya Akademi Award and the Padma Bhushan. His prose has been criticised for its didacticism and defended for putting caste and hunger into English fiction before anyone else would.