		Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 30 April - 6 May, 1998 Issue No.375
Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875		Current issue \| Previous issue \| Site map

Plain Talk

By Mursi Saad El-Din

My lecture last Wednesday at the Indian Cultural Centre on Mulk Raj Anand brought back pleasant memories of my long years of contacts with this leading Indian writer. Mulk is a leading representative of what M.K. Naik calls Indian English Literature. He must be now over 90 years old but his pen has not rusted and from time to time I read some of his contributions to magazines both in India and in Britain. I first met Mulk in Moscow in May 1958 when we held the first preparatory meeting of the nascent Afro-Asian Writers Movement. There were some leading Asian and African writers, including Faiz Ahmed Faiz the leading Pakistani poet, Alex Laguma, a South Africa writer, Safronov and Mirza Tursun Zade from the Soviet Union, Youssef El-Sebai and myself.

That meeting laid the foundation of a movement which grew and developed and which introduced African writers to the world. Its magazine Lotus, published in Arabic, English and French, stands witness to this. Most Asian writers were already known, but under the colonialist system very little African writing ever saw the light of day.

The first conference of Afro-Asian Writers was held in Tashkent in December 1948 where I again met with Mulk. We continued to meet regularly, first in Colombo and then in Cairo. I still keep a photograph of Mulk giving a speech in which I am standing next to him translating what he was saying, while President Nasser was standing opposite listening with interest.

I still cherish my talks and discussions with Mulk, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Sijad Zaheer and our Soviet friends who, under the tolerant leadership of Youssef El-Sebai created the movement of Afro-Asian writers and tended it for many years. It was an off-shoot of the Afro-Asian Solidarity Movement but, somehow, it endured longer. I suppose the reason is that political movements are affected by the political situation which is always ephemeral. Literature, on the other hand, is like a river which must always follow its course.

My lecture about Mulk Raj Anand was not on academic, critical account of his many works: Coolie, Untouchable, Two Leaves and a Bud and others. It was rather a kind of personal memoir based on discussions with that great writer.

Mulk was a believer in the universality of culture and he often said there was a new tendency which was born after the process of decolonisation. That tendency was part of a new, comprehensive historical humanism which accepted insights from the whole human heritage and compelled men to participate in the emergent, one-world culture.

In his opinion, consciously or unconsciously, the most sincere men are dedicated to the acceptance of everything in their own culture, and from other cultures which may help man to fight against nature and realise selfhood.

Mulk was the founder of a beautifully produced cultural magazine called Mary, which means the road. He used to send me copies of the magazine which devoted many of its pages to art. Leafing through some of the copies I have I can see his belief in the universality of art surfacing. I still remember a wonderful sentence he often repeated. "The exuberance of energy and the vision of the artist and the poet is, perhaps, the highest symbol of the rhythm of the universe. In so far as the creative arts today seek to probe the nature of reality, to grasp it, we may be said to have entered an era of the quest for the total human personality.