Nautchization

Mulk Raj Anand’s Novel Technique

DR K. V. S. MURTI

The dancing foot, the sound of the tinkling bells,
The songs that are sung, and the varying steps,
The form assumed by our Dancing Gurupara,
Find out these within yourself, then shall your fetters fall away...¹

I

As Jack Lindsay writes: “In stabilizing and extending the Indian novel, Anand is also adding to the tradition of the post-Joycean European novel”. Just as Huxley’s books trace his ‘self-exploration’ and ‘self-education’, Anand’s picturize his ‘experiments in truth’ and ‘soul-search’. Anand says: “As a primitivist, working in the 20th century, I found that I too have been looking, from the small hole in my head (like Hemingway), to the Cosmos, for alliance with its energies, spreading out my visions in the books”.² He finds that ‘the earth is a kind of hell’, through which humanity passes ‘everyday in a kind of attitude of crucifixion hoping to come out clean at the Other End’. In other words: life is an ‘everlasting dance’, a struggle to attain the Harmony. It is ‘an intoxicated doubt’, ‘a relation to the question of the world as maayaagainst Reality.’

Hence Anand takes up representatives of crushed humanity–a developing child Krishan, an untouchable boy Bakha or Bhikhu, a hill-boy Munoo, a peasant lad Lalu or Panchi, a middle-aged plantation worker Gangu or an English doctor Have, a prince Victor, a trade-unionist Ananta, and a nationalist Maqbool Sherwani–as his heroes, identifies himself with them for his fictional experimentation in truth, and portrays his concept of the pathetic “human dance”, or the “body-soul drama”, in his novels. One who looks for sensational stories in his novels will be sadly disappointed. Yet the lack of a sensational story element is amply compensated for by a sensational technique which is his own.

II

Consequent on his stay in Gandhiji’s Sabarmati Ashram for the Indianization of his first novel Untouchable, Anand writes: “In fact, I was myself somewhat transformed from the Bloomsbury intellectual which I had become in London, to a mere emphatically self-conscious Indian”.³ Aldous Huxley, akin to the ‘Bloomsbury Intellectuals’ and very well-known to Anand, defines his theory of ‘musicalization of fiction’ thus:

The musicalization of fiction. Not in the symbolist way, by subordinating sense to sound. But on a large scale, in the construction. Meditate on Beethoven. The change of mood, the abrupt transition. More interesting still, the modulations not merely from one key to another, but from mood to mood. A theme is started, then developed, pushed out of shape, imperceptibly deformed, until though still recognizably the same, it has become quite different...put this into a novel. How? The abrupt transitions are easy enough. All you need is a sufficiency of characters and parallel, contrapuntal plots. While Jones is murdering a wife, Smith is wheeling the perambulator in the park. You alternate the themes. More interesting, the modulation and variations are also more difficult. A novelist modulates by reduplicating situations and characters. He shows several people falling in love, or dying, praying in different ways–dissimilars solving the same problem. Or vice versa, similar people confronted with dissimilar problems. In this way you can modulate through all the aspects of your theme, you can write variations in any number of different moods. Another way: the novelist can assume the god-like creative privilege and simply elect to consider the events of the story in their various aspects–emotional, scientific, economic, religious, metaphysical, etc. He will modulate from one to the other–as from aesthetic to the physio-chemical aspects of things, from the religious to the physiological or financial. ⁴

Anand’s technique appears somewhat similar to Huxley’s musicaliztion, Indianized to a fine excess in his own ingenious way. There are unmistakable references to the Indian nautch and nautch-girls in his novels. In his first novel, Untouchable, describing his first female character Sohini, Anand gives an idea of the rhythm of movement, music, and the pathos of crushed life:

her left hand on her waist, her right on the pitcher,
and a balance in her steps like the rhythm of a song.⁵

And his next novel Coolie actually affords a fine description of the nautch that creates rhythm in the young hero: Munoo, along with his coolie friend Ratan, visits the apartment of Piari Jan and witnesses the nautch in rapt attention:

Two lovely apparitions darted into the salon, their legs encumbered by the glittering sequins of silken trousers, their upright bodies swathed the thin folds of flashing starched stiff pink aprons, and with brave smiles on their faces which scarcely hid the pathos of their broken spirit ...

Then the harmonium released a soft note of longing and the drums reverberated like the slow thunder of a waterfall, and the two dancers began to sway their hands, which had hung loose, and to move their feet, painted red with henna, so that it seemed that they were burning with an invisible fire...

They took up the accents of Piari’s song on their fingers and mounting the languid notes of the music, danced with a sudden, shrill brilliance, insinuating all the love, the passion, the lust of the poem, with elaborate artistry, by the suggestions of their bodies, the swaying of their tapering arms, the balanced hurrying motion of snakes and vipers, the violence of panthers, the fine insinuating glides of innocent roes, the slow motion of enchantresses casting spells. The fine frenzies of their dazzling olive skins had now been transmuted from the artificiality of the make-up into the transparency of mirrors which reflected the strange colour of their souls. ⁶

Thus the nautch is an attractive modulation of colour and sound, music and rhythm, movement and sensation, idealistic and expressionistic, pervaded by the pathos of crushed life and broken spirits. It is this throbbing ‘nautchization’–to coin a symbolic term modelled on Huxley’s ‘musicalization’–that appears to be the technique adopted for Anand’s fiction, which affords a sensational reading.

III

This technique is strikingly evident in every section of his novels, in some degree or other, in some manner or other. Human mind is not a single melody: it is a series of contrapuntal melodies and discords. Anand says:

Let your emotions, if you like, dominate your physical being; do not let them cloud your brain or bewilder your reason.⁷

Reason should be exercised to create rhythm among contrapuntals for the prevalence of virtue in human mind. This is what Anand tries to achieve and inculcate in the readers, as a novelist. For example: as in a nautch, rhythmic modulation of ideas and ideals, feelings and emotions, is the essence of Gandhiji’s speech in Untouchable. He covers subjects like freedom and patriotism, untouchability and scavenging, casteism and religion, purification and spiritual happiness, philosophy and politics, non-co-operation and non-violence, etc. Similarly coloured is his dictation to his scribe in The Sword and the Sickle:

I am a lover of cattle. I have tried to study the cattle question. Very few people realize that conversation of the cattle wealth of India is a major economic problem beset with many complexities...Adulteration of ghee has always been one of these. During the last few years it has become a growing menace owing to the import of cheap vegetable oil miscalled ghee... The protection of the cow...I call myself a Sanatani Hindu and am therefore pledged to the protection of the cow...Suffering is the mark of human tribe. It is an eternal law. The mother suffers so that the child may live. Life comes out of death. The condition of wheat growing is that the seed grain should perish. No country has ever risen without being purified through the fire of suffering...It is impossible to do away with the law of suffering which is the one indispensable condition of our being. Progress is to be measured by the amount of suffering undergone…The purer the suffering, the greater is the progress...Non-violence in its dynamic condition means conscious suffering….⁸

Lalu aptly feels that

The Mahatma seems to be pouring out his thoughts…from the sublime to the ridiculous, and from the puerile to the profound. ⁹

Likewise, the harangues of the Doctor Mahindra before Adam Singh and Laxmi in The Old Woman and the Cow, or those of Purun Singh Bhagat before Ananta and Janki in The Big Heart, or even the parting letter of Maqbool in Death of Hero, are examples of rhythmic modulations of ideas and ideals pervaded by a pensive touch. The very title of the novel, The Sword and the Sickle, speaks of the imbedded technical feet: the narration is a rhythmic alteration of the sword-like painful and the sickle-like easeful events an dsituations, moods and theories, comic and tragic. Two Leaves and a Bud is the best example of Anand’s technique of nautchization.’ The European club-life and the Indian hut-life, the exploitation of the bosses and the suffering of the coolies, the lust and ire of Reggie and the pure love of Doctor Havre and Barbara, the tragedy of Gangu and the fiasco of the Havre-Barbara relation–these are the contrapuntal themes woven into a seesaw-like movement. On one side are the exploiting English bosses: on the other side are the exploited Indian coolies: in between is Doctor Havre rolling along the plank, between the opposites, between his love for Barbara and his sympathies for the coolies, who finally falls off the plank sacked. The characters are also variegatedly contrapuntal. For example: Regie is a materialist and a lustful hedonist; Gangu passes through various moods from theism to atheism, from godlessness to god-fearing attitude, from acceptance to realization, from selfishness to sacrifice, illusion to reality. But Dr Havre is a rhythmic medley of many moods and ideals as can be seen from his notes, which Barbara reads with delight. He is a physician, an ideal humanist, a sympathiser of the poor, a lover, a poet, a politician; and an economist. That is why, when he is sacked, his sense of humour, the latent rhythm, keeps him intact: he accepts fate, surrenders himself to God, and leaves for Bombay in search of a new job. Describing almost alternately the action and the events with respect to the English and Indian centres, Anand creates a scintillating melody of moods–joy and sorrow, hope and fear, tranquillity and anger, love and lust, humour and pathos. The tragic intensity is redeemed by the comic flashes like the airy gossip in the Tea Estates Club, the humorous description of Regie in the polo-ground, warder Neogi threatening the coolies while Reggie enjoys his wife, the fuss about the coolie revolt: the Royal Air Force planes pouring in batallions of gunmen, the mock-heroic strife of Gangu, and Dr Havre to emerge triumphant, and above all the mock-hunting expedition of His Excellency the Governor of Assam. The two young girls Barbara and Leila, with their hopes and broken spirits, are like nautch-girls, the instruments of action and attraction in the performance. The nautch is set in the panoramic colourful Assam Valley, leaves and buds, the blue above and the green below, with changing colours on their faces, to the music of the coolie-song and the rhythmic sound-beating–of the camel-bells, the lathi-charges, the hooves of Reggie’s mare, the bangles of the women, the cries of the coolie children, the quarrels of the coolie women, the grinders of the tea factory, the drone of the R. A. F. planes, the firing of guns, the hissing of the python, and the “chorus of yells, horn-blasts, drum-throbs, and gun-shots” on the hunting expedition. And the poetic recitation is pictorial, sensuous and satisfying. The entire opera rests on the two protagonists the leading dancers, and carries with it the pathos of crushed life and broken spirits that creates the throbbing interest and purifying effect.

IV

The Indian dance is considered holy having its origin in the graceful movements of Lord Vishnu while killing the demons, Madhu and Kaitabha. Thus the dance is symbolic of the ‘destruction of evil’ and the ‘construction of rhythm’ within and without. Observing the Santhal dance near Bolpur (Bengal) once, Anand himself felt lifted ‘suddenly from the merely incidental to a vision of beauty’ that left ‘a permanent mark on the mind’. The nautch (or dance) has imagination and expressionism as its purview. Anand writes:

The range of expression was strictly prescribed in the classical dances through well-defined mudras or gestures, which were symbols of certain moods and emotions but always interpreted and informed by the genius of a dancer, whether he is the strong handsome male or the beautiful female. The degree of coordination of the dancing foot with music is the essence of this art, while the other arts of architecture, painting and penmanship, help as handmaids. And the synthesis of all these bear a deep relationship to the spirit of man, to the whole of his nature, aspiring from imperfection to perfection through a constant effort at awareness as in the life-process itself. ¹⁰

If man finds out this in his self, ‘then shall his fetters fall away’. This purification ‘from imperfection to perfection’ is what Anand tries to achieve with his ‘nautchized fiction.’ Anand concludes:

The dancing foot is harnessed to the service of man,
the rebel, reaching out from the world as it exists
around us to the world of his dreams. ¹¹

So does Anand with his ‘nautchized fiction’. The nautch is a product of masculine sharpness and energy and feminine tenderness and beauty. ‘Sword and Sickle’ or ‘Eagle and Swan’ or ‘Elephant and Lotus.’ Anand’s fiction has this androgynous, ‘Apollonian-Dionysian or Raajasik-Saattwik’, quality. The selection of the ‘Elephant-and-Lotus’ design by the author himself for the jacket-emblem of his books is symbolic of the nature of art. The ‘little yellow book’, The Lost Child–Anand’s first published fictional work printed by his friend Eric Gill on his hand press in Pigotts to encourage him consequent on the rejection of Untouchable by nineteen publishers–was recognized and included in Great Short Stories of the World. ‘Yellow’ is thus a symbol of achievement forAnand. And all his books, after their remarkable success in the West, have their publication (Kutub-Popular) in yellow cover bearing the Elephant-and-Lotus Emblem.

Footnotes

¹ Quoted by Mulk Raj Anand (From “Vision of the Sacred Dance”): Lines Written to an Indian Air (Bombay: Nalanda Publications, 1949). p. 121.
² Anand’s letter dated November 26, 1967, to the author.
³ Mulk Raj Anand: “TheStory of My Experiments with a White Lie”. Indian Literature (New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, Vol. X, No. 3, July-September 1967). p. 38.
⁴ Aldous Huxley: Point, Counter Point (London: Chatto and Windus, 1937). pp. 408-409. 5
⁵ Mulk Raj Anand: Untouchable (Bombay: Kutub-Popular, 1950). p. 19.
⁶ Mulk Raj Anand: Coolie (Bombay: Kutub-Popular, 1948). pp. 204-205.
⁷ Mulk Raj Anand: Private Life of an Indian Prince (London: The Bodley Head, 1970). p. 329.
⁸ Mulk Raj Anand: The Sword and the Sickle (Bombay: Kutub-Popular, 1955). pp. 202-203.
⁹ Ibid. p. 203.
¹⁰ Ibid. p. 125.
¹¹ Ibid. p. 127.