Mulk Raj Anand As I Saw Him, Knew Him Poem by Bijay Kant Dubey

Mulk Raj Anand, one from Peshawar,
A coppersmith got the chance
Of having a tryst with England,
Not India,
The free and fine atmosphere of it,
Mixing with freely,
Talking and sharing with,
Handshaking and going,
Kissing and hugging

Rather than conservative India,
Orthodox and old, out-moded and out-dated,
Sectarian and theocratic, blind and reasonably dead,
Poor and underdeveloped,
Superstitious and exploited,
Invaded and raided and robbed of
Its glory and grandeur,
Exotic and impregnable,
Undiscovered and unexplored,
Vast and variegated,
Misinterpreted and misexplained.

A novelist from the Punjab was he,
Falling short of a Sikh,
But entertaining and regaling with
His Punjabi English, Hindustani English,
Not an English man,
But a Bakha
In a hat and the goggles,
Talking of the theatre and the heroines
In the style of a hero,
Singing songs and doing the works,
But rebellious and revolting too
As for social injustice subjected to
As none appreciative of the job
He is doing.

We do not who is progressive,
Who was even then
If India can be still seen lagging behind,
Wanting to resort to the bullock carts and murkhamantris,
If India is still a developing nation
Then how to call it mod, modernistic, post-modn and contemporary
And even if it is, the metropolises are,
The people of the urban space and habitation,
The city centres and spaces,
Not the rural hubs and solitary landscapes
Where it dwells the soul of India.

After crossing over to saat samudras and returning from foreign
After being not socially boycotted,
He thought of mixing with the ismic society
And its reactions
A foreign returnee,
Not less than anyone of Indian high class society,
Drawing from the Arya Samaj and Harijanodhara,
Better it to be turned a socialist
To have a say
Other than the rigid Brahminical society men
And blind pundits
As astrologers and pandits foreseeing.

His hero an underdog, a social outcast
As for being a sweeper,
A scavenger hero,
Just like the miner of Lawrence,
The poor girl of A Cup of Tea of Mansfield,
The Beggar Maid of Tennyson,
The Little Black Boy of Blake,
But his heart Shelleyian not,
But Pushkinian, Maykovaskyian, Gorkian,
Pablo Nerudan,
Lohian.

The writer may be progressive, but the society was not,
I am but sure of,
Mulk Raj Anand was,
But not this society of ours
As it is today
Connected with the mobile handsets and television sets,
Quite expressible and observable,
Without any inhibitions,
With whom we want to mix,
Wherever go we.

Mulk Raj Anad's problem as not his solely,
Such a thing witnessed it Forster
In viewing the burquawalli,
The burqua-clad or donning beauties,
That said he not about
As liked he not like Amitava Kumar
To be the husband of a fanatic,
But a backward leader
Complaining against the forwards not,
But as how to be the forwards of Indian politics?