Ideological Confrontation and Synthesis in Mulk Raj Anand’s Conversations in Bloomsbury

Abstract

Mulk Raj Anand (1905–) is an eminent Indian novelist, essayist, critic and thinker. Conversations in Bloomsbury, a work of Anand’s mature years, is an important contribution to the understanding of the English literary history of the Bloomsbury period and of Anand’s own formative years in England. Anand returned to India in 1945 after 25 years of stay in England. As the author of Untouchable, Coolie, the Lalu Trilogy and other works, Anand’s reputation as a successful novelist had been well established: Untouchable carries a preface by E. M. Forster; Letters on India, written on the model of Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj, carries a foreword by Leonard Woolf, and his other works had drawn warm reviews from critics like Bonamy Dobrée, Stephen Spender and George Orwell.While in London, Anand had completed his Ph.D. at the University of London under the supervision of the famous Kantian scholar Professor Dawes Hicks and had come into contact with several prominent literary figures, writers and critics of the twenties and the thirties movements. In Conversations, Mulk Raj Anand fictionalizes his reminiscences of some of the major personalities of the Bloomsbury group and other literary geniuses of the period—T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, E. M. Forster, Aldous Huxley, Bonamy Dobrée, Leonard Woolf and Virginia Woolf.¹