Volume 46, Number 9 · May 20, 1999
A Spirit of Their Own
By Pankaj Mishra
OTHER BOOKS DISCUSSED IN THIS ARTICLE
Freedom Song
by Amit Chaudhuri
Knopf, 434 pp., $24.00
Untouchable
by Mulk Raj Anand
Penguin, 157 pp., $11.95 (paper)
The Quilt and Other Stories
by Ismat Chugtai, Translated from the Urdu by Tahira Naqvi, by Syeda S. Hamed
London: The Women's Press, 240 pp., £5.95
Samskara: A Rite for a Dead Man
by U.R. Anantha Murthy, Translated from the Kannada by A.K. Ramanujan
Oxford University Press, 158 pp., $9.95 (paper)
Nirmala
by Premchand, Translated from the Hindi by Alok Rai
New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 211 pp., Rs. 295
River of Fire
by Qurratulain Hyder, Translated from the Urdu by the author., (to be published in November 1999)
New Directions, 446 pp., $25.95
Mirrorwork: Fifty Years of Indian Writing, 1947-1997
edited by Salman Rushdie, by Elizabeth West
Henry Holt, 550 pp., $15.00 (paper)
Sometime in the late 1920s, in what seems now a significant moment in the history of modern Indian literature, the novelist Mulk Raj Anand showed a first draft of his novel Untouchable to Mahatma Gandhi. Anand was one of the many Indian writers inspired by Gandhi. While he was in England as a student at Cambridge and University College, London, he had begun to rewrite Untouchable after reading Gandhi's essay on a sweeper boy published in the magazine Young India. He had been struck by the simplicity and austerity of Gandhi's writing, and had come to see his own novel as artificially concocted.
Review, 7521 words
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