On Remembering Mulk Raj Anand Poem by Bijay Kant Dubey

Mulk Raj Anand
A novelist Marxist or Gandhian,
Socialist or communist,
Humanist or not,
But a rebel and a revolutionary no doubt?

A goldsmith from the Punjab
And a Ph.D. from England,
Anand meeting Gandhi in the Sabarmati Ashrama
To re-write the version
Of his popular novel.

A novelist of the have-nots and the under-dogs,
The proletariat and the downtrodden mass,
He writes under the red banner
With the star, hammer, sickle and wheat sheaves,
But the meeting with Gandhi
Gave a dimension to

And his anger lessened it
Directed against the rich and the propertied,
The well-to-do and the moneyed
And above all, a society based
On class, creed and other inhuman divisions.

A novelist Punjabi-Hindustani,
Realistic and of ground realities,
He describes romantically the sweeper heroes
As Lawrence describes the coal miners
And Hardy the rustic characters.

The Charles Dickens of India,
Anand was against any sort of oppression and suppression,
Injustice and maltreatment
And as a result of that a large chunk of his literature
A fight against untochability,
The Harijans too are men.