The Theme Of Salvation: Treatment by Mulk Raj Anand and R. K. Narayan

THE THEME OF SALVATION
Treatment by Mulk Raj Anand and R. K. Narayan

K. V. SURYANARAYANA MURTI
Andhra University, Waltair

It is no wonder, in whatever language Indians write, that their national themes and ideas–notions and beliefs–creep into their creative art. And it is no exception with regard to Indian writing in English. One of the peculiar excellences of Indo-Anglian literature is that it is rich with Vedantic thought which has attracted and charmed the West immensely. While the scope for philosophic musing through direct expression is ample in poetic rhythm, certainly it is limited in fiction wherein the main concern is to present, in vivid hues, pictures of social life–the bright and black in society, primarily in terms of a plot. Only an able artist like Mulk Raj Anand or R. K. Narayan can fit philosophy into his plot in a natural way moulding it into a real work of art of high calibre.

The excellence in the work Anand and Narayan, two of the top-ranking Indo-Anglian writers, is in that they could blend splendidly philosophy and commonplace themes. In other words philosophic ideas are presented in terms of social plots in their novels. The Indian sense of salvation, as it were, knowingly or unknowingly, finds expression in their novels. Their treatment of the theme of salvation is outstanding, simply grand.

The type of the theme of salvation adopted by both Anand and Narayan is salvation through death. They take up a central character as the protagonist, and present his biography superficially; but, in fact, what is presented in suggestive terms is the spiritual advancement of the soul–subdued by evil, external or internal–pushing forward, towards redemption through death. Their theme can best be described–employing Shelley’s words–thus:

Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass
Stains the white radiance of eternity,
Until Death tramples it to fragments…..

when the soul is ‘awakened from the dream of life’ into salvation:

…….the pure spirit shall flow

to the burning fountain whence it came,
A portion of the eternal.

The mature novels of Anand and Narayan portray this theme in suggestive terms with chiselled perfection, while in some others of their novels we find this theme on its way to perfection or in its raw and incomplete form. But, their approaches to the theme are different: whereas Anand admits external evil, evil of the society, cruelty of man to man, as the scorching torch that affects the soul driving it to strive for salvation, what Narayan has employed is internal evil-self-inflicted evil, that is, suicidal deception. Both the views or ways are, of course, based on Karma Vedanta. The two great artists are doubtless experts in their own ways in handling their chosen approach to the theme.

In Anand’s novels the theme mainly revolves round a simple central character–say, a Gangu, a Bakha, or a Munoo, who symbolizes the soul or spirit–whom the society exploits and tortures reducing him much, more, most, and finally to nought. In other words Anand charges and blames the society as the sole cause for the lot of the ‘downtrodden and underprivileged’ with a ‘Dickensian piquancy’ or vehemence. This is all that is found on the surface; a deep pry would, however, reveal the latent didactic motif and symbolic theme of salvation. A graded evolution of the theme can be found embedded, for instance, in his Two Leaves and a Bud, Untouchable, and Coolie. In the first novel the theme of salvation is in its hinted-at stage; here the external evil is the cruelty of the European bosses that pesters the hero and his family. The novel is designed as a painful tragedy dealing with the disastrous death of the hero. Gangu, a labourer, along with his family thrusts himself unknown into into an evil trap, the Macpherson Tea Estate in Assam, which can be described aptly as Earthly Hell dominated by the Europeans, where the labourers are literally put to tortures and never let go out. He suffers much; his wife becomes a victim to malaria; he himself embraces tragic death, shot dead in his attempt to protect his daughter; Leila, from being raped by the lustful assistant manager, Reggie. The innocence of the soul (symbolized by Gangu) is, to some extent, though not succcssfully,hinted at, but it is lacking in striking the purity of it.In Untouchable the span of evil finds expansion into larger dimensions of the town, Bulashah. Cruelty is presented in the form of caste-hatred. The hero of the novel is Bakha, a tiny young boy of eighteen, who has to perform the strenuous job of cleaning rows of latrines many a time, daily, single-handed. The novel narrates a day’s experiences of the hero: the boy perceives Kali Nath, the priest, in lust, making improper suggestions to his sister, Sohini, which infuriated him; he attends painfully the marriage of his friend’s sister whom he has been barred to marry simply for the reason that she belongs to a higher caste than his own; that he has scored a goal in a hockey match played in the afternoon against the Punjabis lead to a free fight; trying to lift up an injured child, he has to court rebukes for having polluted the child; and, finally, when he returns home his father, Lakha, the Jemadar of the town sweepers, charging him with the guilt of idling away time, necks him out with which ‘Bakha’s cup of frustration and misery is full’. Consequently, towards the end of the book the frustrated boy is seen in a state of bewilderment and awe with his mind torn between extremities–whether to embrace Christianity to end his caste restrictions, or to remain in the hope of Mahatma’s casteless or creedless society or the future advent of the machine that cleans human dirt and animal dung. Selecting a young eighteen year-old boy as the hero, who is scarcely aware of, or just beginning to understand, what are called sin and evil, Anand makes the boy symbolize the pure and semi-innocent soul or spirit that suffers suffocation under the heavy weight of external evil; suffering nourishes spiritual anguish; yet the spirit is hardly ripe for salvation with the flame of hope for life still burning within. The soul is left in a state of a sort of mystic dilemma in the Untouchable.

Anand’s handling of the theme of salvation reaches its apogee in his mature novel, Coolie; the treatment is simply superb. Really, it is the prose epic of modern India–a novel expanding both in time and space. It presents the biography of a young orphan-boy, Munoo, who is supposed to stand as a symbol for India’s millions of exploited and suffering poor. The boy finally dies, a young boy exploited by the greedy, merciless, evil society to the last drop of his blood. The plot of the novel is very simple. In the words of Prof. Iyengar:

With the hero, the hill-boy Munoo, we move too, and follow his fortunes or rather misfortunes first with his uncle and aunt in his village, Bilaspur; then with the Bank Sub-Accountant’s family at Sham Nagar, where Munoo works as a servant; then with Munoo’s benefactor, Prabha, and his wife in the incredible Cat Killers’ Lane in the old feudal city, Daulatpur; We are presently lost with Munoo in Bombay’s slums and chawls and noise and madness and general filth and oases of splendour; and, lastly, with Mrs. Mainwaring at Simla, as her page and rickshaw-puller, where he dies of consumption.

The boy who wants to thrive runs from place to place, to escape from one place of evil to another; wherever he goes he is exploited, made to starve and suffer. It is something like the soul’s journey through a life’s desert–where there is all trouble, wild winds, sand- storms, hot sands and scorching heat–running after hope for salvation. Munoo, indeed, comes across some oases, oases-like good characters, in his journey of life, who are also disabled in the hands of the greedy, well-to-do and high-handed members of society. All this forms the superstructure or the spectacular part that meets the eye immediately in concrete terms. But, the basic core, the grandeur, of Anand’s art is the latent theme of salvation embedded. Munoo, the innocent orphan-boy–who knows, nor tries to know, no evil short-cuts to thrive–symbolizes the pure and simple soul; external evil, exploitation or cruelty of society, haunts the soul; frustration and ever-increasing physical suffering result in a gradual spiritual advancement of the soul; the pure and innocent soul finally attains redemption into salvation through death. In fact, our scriptures say that the souls of children that die as children early are as pure as flowers and reach the One untainted with sin or evil. In this novel, the symbolic theme of salvation is unmistakably evident. The irony of fate, the note of tragic death awaiting Munoo, is hinted at frequently, for instance, at the very beginning of the novel, in his aunt Gujri’s words: ‘Munoo ohe Munooa oh Mundu! Where have you died? Where have you drifted, you of the evil star?’ It is also seen in the boy’s own words, on the eve of his departure to Sham Nagar, to Jay Singh, the village landlord’s son: ‘No, never; I never want to come . At one stage in his journey of life, while travelling in the special train of a circus company to Bombay, the stern-willed boy murmurs within himself:

No, I would kill myself rather than go . I would prefer to die…..

The rapid spiritual advancement of the soul seeking the Goal is beautifully suggested in the final chapter that it forms the central core conveying the theme of salvation. Almost at the very beginning of the final chapter Anand lets us conceive the sense of frustration when the soul begins to review the past with a mood of surrender to the Supreme creeping in:

But really he was mentally and physically broken. And as he thought of the conditions under which he had lived, of the intensity of the struggle, and the futility of the waves of revolt falling upon the hard rock of privilege and possession, as he thought of Ratan and Hari and Lakshmi, and the riots, he felt sad and bitter and defeated, like an old man.

Next, for the first time, nearing his end, the sense of God occupies the precious chambers of the boy’s mind as he goes up to Simla in the Chevrolet of Mrs. Mainwaring:

He did not want to make fun of God, though, because he saw some of the coolies and hillmen trudging up to Simla, borne down beneath the sacks of food-stuffs on their s, and he thought it was the blessing of the Almighty that he sat comfortably, being carried in a motor-car. It was nice to be hurried along, past trees and houses, ponies and men, up, up and up to the heavenly heights above the clouds.

Beauty replaces zest for life, the boy attains negative capability, finds contentment, rather becomes quite excited about his job–the strenuous job of pulling the rickshaw of his pseudo-charitable mistress, Mrs. Mainwaring. In other words the struggling spirit of the soul vanishes yielding place to solace in discharging due Karma. Physically, to the strenuous, bone-breaking, blood-consuming job of rickshaw-pulling, the tiny little boy succumbs, clasps consumption and becomes weak day by day, step by step, with increasing acceleration. Conversely to the gradual decay of the physical being, the soul, in the clutches of a dreadful disease, attains perfection, reaches such spiritual heights that the boy finds no difference between good and evil; he even forgives the sin-clad bitch, Mrs. Mainwaring, in his heart. And Anand’s portrayal of this stage of the soul is unforgettable:

Munoo had borne a resentment against her during the later stages of her friendship with Major Marchant. And when he had begun to bleed, and the knowledge of death confronted him, he had hated her for a while. But now that he was actually sick in bed, vaguely torn between the fear of dying and the hope of living, something happened to him. He felt docile and good and kind towards her and every one else. It was as if the nerves of his body in their gradual weakening had begun to accept the humiliation which in the pride of their functioning they had never acknowledged.

Thus, the soul has reached a stage of perfection to invite even death joyfully. Finally, the last two short paragraphs so exquisitely, so profoundly, suggest the final catastrophe or the awakening of the purified and innocent soul into salvation redeemed through death:

Munoo clutched at Mohan’s hand and felt the warm blood in his veins like a tide reach out to distances to which it had never gone before.

But in the early hours of one unreal white night he passed away–the tide of his life having reached to the deeps.

While in Anand’s art external evil is found set as the invisible force for the spiritual advancement of the soul, Narayan chooses the internal or self-inflicted evil, one’s own Karma, that flags, as the means of purifying the soul, giving birth to spiritual anguish. The purified soul achieves maturity, sheds off the robes of self and physical being, and finally flies to the heights. This, indeed, is the quintessence of Narayan’s art. Like Anand, Narayan too gives prominence to the superstructure, the physical plot, and reveals the theme of salvation in symbolic or suggestive terms. The theme of salvation through death reaches the climax in his mature novel, The Guide; and in his other novels this theme receives raw or incomplete treatment. In Narayan’s novels again we have a central character–say, a Sampath, a Margayya, a Raju, round whom the theme circles–who does try to overreach, to exploit the society around him, the men and women whom he comes into touch with. The protagonists, in order to fill up their cups of  craze, try to fly high, so high on their wings of evil, that at one level they merely scorch their wings and in vain they retreat to where they start having lost the ego of the soul. This is what we find embeded in the roles of Sampath of Mr. Sampath, and Margayya of the Financial Expert. In other words Narayan, in these novels, portrays the ambitious flight of the self in pursuit of physical or material gratification and finally presents a tranquil soul frustrated and devoid of ego, yet hardly ripe for salvation.

But, his Guide is a pioneering effort and grand success dealing with the theme of salvation through death in terms of a physical plot. The novel gives the biography of the hero, Raju, that symbolizes the journey of the soul from mundane levels to spiritual heights finally redeemed through death. The plot-content of The Guide is simply this (in the words of Prof. Iyangar):

Raju is a romantic doubled with a rascal like his fictional predecessors, Mangayya and Sampath. Raju too plays many ‘parts’….Trying to help a rich visitor, Marco, in his researches, Raju is involved in a tangle of new relationships. Rosie, Marco’s wife, becomes Raju’s lover. Abandoned by Marco, Rosie realizes, with Raju’s help, her ambition of becoming a dancer. But his possessive instinct finally betrays him into a criminal action, and he is charged and convicted of forgery. Coming out of the jail, he cuts off all connections with the past and sets up as a sort of ascetic or Mahatma. Once again he is caught in the coils of his own self-deception, and he is obliged to undertake a twelve-day fast to end a drought that threatens the district with a famine. In vain he tells his chief ‘disciple’, Velan, the whole truth about himself and Rosie, and about the crash and the incarceration. But nobody would now believe that he is–or has been–anyone other than a Mahatma. He has made his bed, and he must perforce lie on it. We are left to infer that, on the last day of the fast, he dies opportunely, a martyr.

The novel, in truth, describes Raju’s life from birth to death punctuated into two halves–the span before Raju’s release from jail and that after. ‘Technically, The Guide is an advance on the earlier novels: the present and the past are cunningly jumbled to produce a somewhat tantalizing effect’. The narrative technique employed–albeit, ingenious indeed–is no alien one grafted to the plot; obviously, it is conversant with, rather natural to, the mode of the latent symbolic theme of salvation. The essential part of the theme is the germination of spiritual anguish, the culmination, and the sacred redemption of the soul through death, that is, the later half ofthe hero’s life after his release from the prison. As a sign of the spiritual anguish set in, or beginning to set in, the sinner is to review his sinful past and know his own follies and foibles, when the spirit unconsciously surrenders itself to the Divine. But, the novelist should keep on narrating the current events essential to the theme. So, the past is presented as reviewed by the sinner, the hero, in the first person; the present is told in the third person by the author. Quite aptly to the theme, the present and the past are to be narrated alternatingly in bits, and Narayan did this artistically hardly clogging the reader’s interest.

The novel begins strikingly with the current phase of the hero, with Raju seated on the steps of a lone old temple in the attire of a swami cleanly shaven, and Velan the first devotee–in other words Raju’s guiding-destiny–approaching him. The frustrated Raju released from jail has actually intended a real life anew. But, fate hardly allows him. It is all Karma driving the soul to the goal, and Narayan voices this at one stage in the novel using Rosie as the transmitter to his voice: of Raju, she merely said, ‘I felt all along you were not doing the right things. This is Karma. What can we do?’ The foul career with a reaped-consequence that passed, and the present trap designed by destiny in the guise of the villagers’ faith and worshipping, in which he has one stepplaced already, create a sort of stunning awe in him; a sense of spiritual anguish flashes in his mind as a result; the hero reviews his past frankly; that is really needed for self-awareness and purification of the soul. In vain he reveals his true self before Velan:

I am not a saint, Velan, I’m just an ordinary human being like anyone else. Listen to my story, you will know it yourself…..

Destiny leads the soul forward; he is obliged to undertake a fast to end a drought and threat of famine. ‘All thoughts of tongue and stomach’ are erased from his mind. The fact that the acceptance and executing of the fast has stimulated the spiritual advancement of the soul, Narayan describes finally in suggestive terms:

This resolution gave him a peculiar strength. He developed on those lines: ‘If by avoiding food I should help the trees bloom, and the grass grow, why not do it thoroughly? For the first time in his life he was making earnest effort, for the first time he was learning the thrill of full application, outside money and love; for the first time he was doing a thing in which he was not personally interested. He felt suddenly so enthusiastic that it gave him a new strength to go through with the ordeal. The fourth day of his fast found him quite sprightly. He went down to the river, stood facing up stream with his eyes shut, and repeated the litany. It was no more than a supplication to the heavens to send down rain and save humanity. It was set in a certain rhythmic chant, which lulled his senses and awareness, so that as he went on saying it over and over again, the world around became a blank.

The passage thus suggests that the soul is completely purged of ego. Mechanical action is transformed into sacred ritual; the soul is fully purified with the fat. Physical being decays step by step; the regenerated soul reaches higher and higher heights transcending mundane levels. And Raju realizes within: ‘I am only doing what I have to do.’ Now comes the finale: Raju declines the Government doctor’s request to break the fast; the soul hurries past the embraces of death. The redemption through death, the awakening of the purified and inspired soul into Eternity, is so beautifully described by Narayan in Raju’s end, at the end, in a tantalizing passage .

He is very weak….He gets up to his feet. He had to be held by Velan and another on each side. In the profoundest silence the crowd followed him down….Raju I could not walk, but he insisted upon pulling himself along all the same. He panted with the effort. He went down the steps of the river, halting for breath on each step, and finally reached his basin of water. He stepped into it, shut his eyes and turned towards the mountain, his lips muttering the prayer. The morning sun was out by now; a great shaft of light illuminated the surroundings. It was difficult to hold Raju on his feet, as he had a tendency to flop down. They held him as if he were a baby. Raju opened his eyes, looked about, and said, ‘Velan, it’s raining in the hills, I can feel it coming up under my feet, up my legs–’ and with that he sagged down.

The spirit achieves the purity of a ‘baby’, and the final glow of the purified spirit is suggested in ‘a great shaft of light illuminated the surroundings.’ The physical being has sagged down; the inner soul flies to Eternity. However much sinful one has been in his life, repentance purifies the soul; and a single, whole-hearted, pious act coupled with devotion is enough to purge off all sin and regenerate the soul, which at the end is awakened from this dream of life into salvation through death–this is what, indeed, our scriptures say. And Narayan seems to preach and teach this simple didactic truth in effective terms through his works, in his Guide in particular:

It is, thus, obvious that whereas Anand has employed extern evil, Narayan seeks the internal evil, and repentance as the means of purifying the soul for salvation. Anand’s job seems rather easy for he straightaway takes up a pure and innocent character (usually a boy) representing the soul and concentrates much, on deriding the society as the external evil pestering the spirit, and in laying bare the miserable lot of the downtrodden. In other words in his novels–as in Raja Rao’s–there is much spectacular that meets the eye at once. Narayan’s task is rather difficult, since he (generally taking up a grown-up man as the hero symbolizing the soul) has to present the various developing phases–the sinner’s evil life, repentance, achieving self-awareness, regeneration, and, finally, salvation. Narayan’s novels provide food for thought and meditation. The apparent simplicity poses a deceptive immaturity; but, he, in reality, could succeed in effectively integrating the material and the spiritual more than any of our novelists could. His novels are masterpieces finely spun. They bear ‘the Narayan trade marks–unhurried pace, unfailing good humour, kindliness, gentle satire.’ Both Narayan and Anand are the storytellers, par excellence. Both, thus, could successfully blend philosophy and human drama, could supremely paint the former in symbolic colours of the latter. Dickens has exposed and scoffed at the evil society–say, in his Oliver Twist–likeAnand; but what Dickens or even Hardy perhaps failed at, or hardly attempted, Anand could achieve: to raise human drama to the heights of spiritual significance in novel. And what Anand has just achieved Narayan could perfectly chisel and paint in lovely colours. And there is nothing strange in that Narayan could win Sahitya Akademi Trophy in 1960, warm tributes from the West, and the splendid applause of Somerset Maugham (who paid a personal visit to Narayan in India at Mysore), Graham Greene, and I. A. Richards in particular.