ਦ ਬਿਗ ਹਾਰਟ

About the book

The Big Heart, published by Hutchinson in London in 1945, is Mulk Raj Anand's novel of one day in the life of Amritsar's coppersmiths. Its setting is Kucha Billimaran, Cat Killers Lane, a narrow lane of thirty or forty houses in the centre of the city, home to the thathiars, the hereditary makers of copper and brass vessels. When the novel opens, two headmen, Muralidhar and Gokul Chand, have set up a factory making copper utensils by machine, and the lane that lived by the hammer is facing hunger.

Into this lane comes Ananta, a coppersmith who has worked in Bombay and Ahmedabad and taken part in the Gandhian freedom struggle. He is the big heart of the title: a man who can see that the machine is both the thing destroying his people and the only road by which they might live, if they band together and claim a place inside the new order. Anand, whose own father had been a coppersmith before he became a soldier, wrote the book out of the craft world he came from, and critics have long placed it with Untouchable and Coolie among his most powerful novels.

What happens in The Big Heart?

The whole action takes place in a single day. Ananta returns to Amritsar with Janaki, a young widow who is dying of tuberculosis and who lives with him in defiance of the lane's opinion. He finds the thathiars divided: some want to smash the factory, some want to beg the factory owners for work, and all of them are suspicious of a man who talks about machines and unions in the same breath. Around him Anand sets the other voices of the lane: Puran Singh Bhagat, a poet, Satyapal, a student leader, and Ralia, an ex labourer whose grievances are turning to frenzy.

Ananta argues for the harder road: not destroying the machine but organising, so that the coppersmiths can bargain together for work in the factory that displaced them. The lane will not unite behind him. At the climax Ralia, in a sudden madness, begins smashing the machines, and Ananta tries to stop him. In the struggle Ananta's head is battered against a machine and he dies. The novel ends with the machine, in the bleakest of its images, emerging as the winner over the man.

Themes: hand, machine and the big heart

The stated theme is the conflict between hereditary craftsmen and capital, but the book's real argument is about how people should meet change. Anand gives the thathiars' case its full dignity: their skill is generations deep, their brotherhood is a whole society, and the factory threatens not only their income but their customs, their marriages and their gods. A reader is never allowed to treat the lane as a relic that deserves to vanish.

Yet the novel refuses the easy answer of smashing the machine. Ananta's tragedy is that he alone holds both truths at once: pride in the hand's work, and the knowledge that the hand alone can no longer feed the lane. His proposed answer, solidarity, fails not because it is wrong but because hunger, caste feeling and demagogy arrive faster than organisation. The big heart, in Anand's phrase for his hero, is the capacity to understand every side of the quarrel, and the novel suggests that society meets the challenge of change only when that understanding is matched by accommodation on all sides.

ਲੇਖਕ

Mulk Raj Anand (1905 to 2004) was born in Peshawar, the son of Lal Chand, a coppersmith and soldier, and was educated at the University of Punjab and in London, where he took his doctorate in 1929. The Big Heart was his seventh novel, written in London towards the end of the Second World War, after the Lalu trilogy of The Village, Across the Black Waters and The Sword and the Sickle had made him, by the time he returned to India in 1946, the best known Indian novelist abroad. The coppersmiths' world was therefore not research to him: it was his father's trade, and the novel carries the sounds, smells and hammer rhythms of the Amritsar bazaars he knew.

Reception and legacy

Reviewers of later editions have praised the novel's concentration, its documentation of a working community, and its tragic construction within the unities of a single day and a single lane. The edition edited with an introduction by Saros Cowasjee, published by Vision Books in 2015, presents it as a moving and timeless tale of craftsmen coming to grips with automation, and notes that its story of livelihoods overturned by a new technology has only become more familiar since 1945. Within Anand's shelf, The Big Heart completes the Punjab sequence that runs from the village of The Village through the trenches of Across the Black Waters to this Amritsar lane: the fullest picture in English fiction of a Punjabi working world at the moment it changed for good.

Is The Big Heart based on a real place?

Yes, in its setting. Billimaran, the coppersmiths' lane, and the bazaars named in the novel, including Kesarian Bazar and the Ironmongers Bazar, are drawn from the old walled city of Amritsar, and the thathiar community of hereditary vessel makers was a real community of the city. The factory, the headmen and Ananta himself are Anand's inventions, built to carry a real conflict that machine made utensils brought to artisan lanes across Punjab in the early 1940s.