Plain Talk

By Mursi Saad El-Din

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With the death of the leading Indian writer Mulk Raj Anand, I've lost yet another good friend. The first time I met Mulk was in May 1958, during a meeting held in Moscow in preparation for the first Afro-Asian Writers Conference. Egypt was represented by the late novelist Youssef El-Sebai and myself, while the committee included Mulk Raj Anand from India, Faiz Ahmed Faiz from Pakistan, Hotta from Japan and Anatoli Sofonou from the Soviet Union.

We drew up plans, the agenda of the conference, which was held, I remember, from 7 to 10 October in Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekestan. That first meeting sowed the seeds of a friendship that was to last well into the 1970s.

When the Permanent Bureau of Afro-Asian Writers was established, I became the Egyptian representative, Mulk represented India and Faiz Pakistan. A three-sided friendship was cemented among us, and when in the Alma Ata Conference it was decided to produce a history of the movement, the three of us were chosen for the job.

I had known Mulk long before we met, of course. I had read his novel, Untouchable, a classic that appeared in 1935.

He was born in 1905, and up until his death a few days ago he never stopped producing literary and artistic work. He is a representative of what came to be called Indian English literature, his name associated with such major figures as K S Venkataraman, Narajan, R K Narayan and Mekerji.

Mulk was educated at University College, London, and earned his PhD in philosophy. In his introduction to Untouchable, E M Forester notes how Mulk has "just the mixture of insight and detachment, and the fact that he has come to fiction through philosophy," he adds, "gives him depth".

Such qualities were evident in the speech Mulk gave during a reception held by President Nasser for participants of the second Afro- Asian Writers Conference in Cairo in February 1962, which I had the pleasure of translating.

Mulk had, until a few years ago, always sent me copies of Marg, an art magazine he founded and edited. I know now that the reason I stopped receiving it was the frailty of his health, an eventuality of which I remained blissfully unaware even as I regretted the pleasures afforded by the magazine, which benefited from his intelligence and discernment.

I will always remember a visit to India at the invitation of the Indian Council of Cultural Relations, while Mulk was attached to the council. He invited me to his home, where I met his wife, the distinguished performer of classical Indian dance, Shirin Vajibdar. She had a studio in her home and she obliged me with a specimen of her art.

Our meetings in Japan, Indonesia, Ceylon, Beirut and Cairo were more than pleasant get-togethers. They were opportunities for exchanging ideas and discussing issues pertaining by and large to the role of writers in Africa and Asia. In a seminar held by the conference to discuss tradition and innovation, Mulk expressed his opinion, which I ascribe to his perceptiveness combined with intellectual power.

He believed that tradition is innovation of the past, which becomes, in his own words, "part of the human metabolism, the warp and woof of our inheritance, in which we are clothed. We take these innovations for granted..."

Innovation, he went on to say, "is a new way of looking at things in the light of felt experience and knowledge, a departure from the old to the new myth, or the renovation of the old myth in order to make it relevant to our own time..."

Many obituaries of Mulk have appeared in the English and American press. One statement from the Independent 's Alistair Niven seems to me to capture the essence of his achievement: "He was a great writer, but even more than that a very great lover of humanity."