4 - Mulk Raj Anand in the Mud

Summary

A photograph buried in the collection of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France shows eight Indian men, dressed in turbans, digging through the rocky earth (Figure 4.1). The photograph was taken in September 1914, in all likelihood in France, where 138,608 Indians would arrive to fight in the first year of war. More details are hard to come by. While it is unclear what these men were digging – a well, an irrigation ditch, a grave, a trench – their movements appear old and practised. Hailing from the rural northern provinces of Undivided India, as did so many recruits at the time, these eight men had been accustomed to working the land long before they enlisted in the British army, boarded a ship and stepped ashore in France in the midst of a global conflict. The power relations implicit in such a trajectory, and implicit in this scene in the French countryside, are obscured in the photograph, with the British officer overseeing the work and the white photographer taking a picture both positioned just outside the frame. This chapter reads affective moments of contact with the soil in relation to these power imbalances in Mulk Raj Anand's First World War trilogy. In The Village, Across the Black Waters and The Sword and the Sickle, composed in the late 1930s and early 1940s, Anand explores engagements with the land in a literal and abstract sense, moving from scenes of men working the fields in the Punjab, and crawling through the mud of northern France, to men handling the documents, such as land revenue notices and military files, that governed these movements. My argument is that the encounter with the land, and with the documents that determined its ownership, serves as an image in these novels for the loss of agency, thus functioning as an implicit critique of the power structures of empire. In the photograph, too, the backs of these Indian soldiers are turned to the camera, their faces indistinct.

India was Britain's proudest possession in an empire that would be at its largest in the years following the taking of this photograph, after Britain acquired German overseas possessions in the Treaty of Versailles. As an army recruiter in Anand's The Village observes, ‘the sun never sets on the kingdom of George Panjam’.