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About the book

Morning Face is an autobiographical novel by Mulk Raj Anand, first published in India in 1968 by Kutub Popular of Bombay. It is the second volume of Seven Ages of Man, the vast fictional autobiography Anand planned in seven parts, one for each of the seven ages in Shakespeare's famous speech in As You Like It. He completed four of the seven: Seven Summers (1951), Morning Face (1968), Confession of a Lover (1976) and The Bubble (1984). The first volume, Seven Summers, is also in this Kosh.

Seven Summers covered the first seven years of its hero's life in a British Indian Army cantonment and ended with the outbreak of war in 1914. Morning Face carries the same boy, Krishan, Anand's younger self, out of early childhood into boyhood and adolescence. The Authors' Calendar dates the book's historical span from the beginning of the First World War to the Jallianwala Bagh Massacre of 1919, so the boy's private growing up runs alongside the years in which Punjab itself was shaken to its foundations.

Why is it called Morning Face?

The title comes from Shakespeare's schoolboy, the second of the seven ages, whining and snail slow on his way to school, with his shining morning face. Critic K. R. S. Iyengar's phrase for this volume, quoted in summaries of the book, is that Krishan has entered boyhood and carries that shining morning face. The face is fresh, but the world it looks at is not: between the covers of this one boyhood sit a world war, a sprawling family's pressures, and a province heading towards the violence of 1919.

A boyhood between Amritsar and Ludhiana

Summaries of the novel describe Krishan's world widening beyond the cantonment of Seven Summers: he moves first to Amritsar, and then to Ludhiana, where his elder brother serves as an Assistant Jailor. Iyengar wrote of the boy as subject to all the visible and invisible stresses and tensions of a sprawling family of uncles, aunts, cousins and other relations, and the novel's method, as its readers describe it, is a personalised telling of the politics and history of those years through one boy's eyes.

The family behind the fiction matters to the portrait. Anand was born into a family of mixed Punjab: his father, Lal Chand, came from a family of coppersmiths and silversmiths and became a military clerk, and his mother came from a Sikh peasant family, as the IGNOU study unit on Anand records. That double inheritance, artisan and peasant, Hindu and Sikh, home and regiment, is the ground the whole Seven Ages of Man sequence stands on, and Morning Face is where the boy begins to test it against the towns and schools of the plains.

By the end of the book, in the reading the summaries preserve, something has woken in Krishan: he speaks of a new kind of poetry in himself, of a wish to sing and to awaken to the freedom of the whole universe. The schoolboy of the shining morning face is becoming the writer who would spend the next two decades turning this life into the remaining volumes of the sequence.

ਲੇਖਕ

Mulk Raj Anand (1905 to 2004) was born in Peshawar on 12 December 1905 and educated at Khalsa College, Amritsar, where he graduated with honours in 1924, and then in England, where he took a PhD in philosophy in 1929. With R. K. Narayan and Raja Rao he founded the Indian English novel; Untouchable (1935) and Coolie (1936) made his name as the teller of the lives of India's poor, with Punjabi and Hindustani idiom carried into English. He returned to India in 1947, founded the arts journal Marg, and embarked in 1950 on the Seven Ages of Man project. He died in Pune on 28 September 2004, aged 98.

Reception and legacy

Morning Face won Anand the Sahitya Akademi Award for 1971, in the English novel category, the official awards list of the Sahitya Akademi records. It remains the best documented honour of his later career, and it was given for the most personal of his books. Anand himself set the novel beside a famous contemporary: he considered Morning Face to be built on the structural lines of Raja Rao's The Serpent and the Rope, but separated from it by the values it espoused.

The book travelled within India: Revuri Anantha Padmanabha Rao translated it into Telugu as Prabhata Vadanam, published by the Sahitya Akademi in New Delhi in 1992. For readers today, Morning Face is the middle chapter of the Anand story the Kosh tells across several pages: the cantonment child of Seven Summers, the schoolboy of Amritsar and Ludhiana here, and behind both the protest novelist of Untouchable and Coolie, remembering how a Punjabi boy became a writer while an empire went to war.