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About the book

The Sword and the Sickle is a novel by Mulk Raj Anand, first published in London in 1942, and it closes the trilogy that Anand built around Lal Singh, called Lalu, a Sikh peasant from a Punjabi village. The Village (1939) showed Lalu's childhood under debt, custom and the moneylender, and his flight into the British Indian Army. Across the Black Waters (1940) took him through the trenches of France to capture by the Germans. This third volume brings him home, and asks what a man who has fought an empire's war is to do with the freedom he was promised. Both earlier volumes are in this Kosh.

Anand wrote the novel between July 1940 and January 1941, the dates he set under its last line, while living in Britain and campaigning for Indian independence as the Second World War began. Its subject, though, is the India of twenty years earlier: the peasant rising in Oudh in 1920 and 1921, drawn in part from the account of that movement in Jawaharlal Nehru's Autobiography of 1936. The title itself was given to Anand by George Orwell: the sword for the soldier Lalu had been, the sickle for the peasant he remained.

What happens in The Sword and the Sickle?

Lalu returns from the war, released from a German prison camp, expecting the soldier's reward, a gift of land and a pension. He is dismissed without either, suspected of disaffection, and discovers that his family's land has been sold off to the landlord in his absence. The first chapters frame the whole novel in that betrayal. Angry and rootless, he marries his childhood sweetheart and is drawn east into the gathering peasant movement in Oudh, in what is now Uttar Pradesh.

In Oudh, Lalu joins the kisan sabha, the farmers' union then spreading through the province under leaders including a landlord who has turned peasant leader, Count Rampal Singh. He learns the organiser's trade at the sharp end: a peasant, Sukhua, evicted from his land, another dead while doing begar, unpaid forced labour. Lalu learns to speak at rallies, carries the peasants' case to Gandhi and to Nehru, is present when the kisan sabha is founded, and sees a court case against a peasant thrown out after the peasants demonstrate. Then the movement breaks: its leader is interned, the peasants set out to plead with the authorities against the internment, they are fired on, and Lalu ends the novel in prison.

Themes: the sword, the sickle and the meeting hall

The novel is built as an argument. Through its meetings and conversations it debates the roads open to India's peasants in 1921: change by law, Gandhian nonviolent resistance, and the organised politics gathering around the kisan sabhas, the beginnings of communist organisation in India that Orwell named in his review. Anand hands the argument to no single speaker. Lalu, educated in turn by the village, the trenches and the meeting hall, has to weigh leaders who agree on the peasants' misery and on little else, which is why scholars still read the book as a debate about how the poor should organise, not only as a story of a rising.

Under the argument sits the trilogy's real subject, the making of Lalu. The boy who rebelled against his village's priest and moneylender, and the sepoy who watched Indian soldiers treated as less than their British officers, becomes in this volume an organiser who can hold a crowd. The combined trilogy has been called a story of the transformation of a man and a nation on an epic scale, and the finest and most balanced of Anand's works, and this final volume is where the transformation completes itself: the rebel becomes a leader, and pays the leader's price.

ਲੇਖਕ

Mulk Raj Anand (1905 to 2004) was born in Peshawar, educated at Khalsa College, Amritsar, and took his doctorate in philosophy in London in 1929. He made his name with Untouchable (1935) and Coolie (1936), novels of a sweeper boy and a servant boy, and the Lalu trilogy that followed is his largest single design: one peasant life followed across village, war and revolution. He wrote The Sword and the Sickle in wartime London, in the circle of George Orwell, who gave the book its title and defended it in print on publication. Anand returned to India in 1946, founded the arts journal Marg, and received the Sahitya Akademi Award and the Padma Bhushan. His full story is in his Kosh entry.

Reception and legacy

The novel was reviewed on publication by the writers Anand knew. Edwin Muir in The Listener called it one of the most remarkable books Anand had written, an honest attempt to describe objectively the discontent in India, and Orwell, defending it in Horizon in July 1942, treated its appearance as a sign of a new English language Indian literature that would shape the postwar world. Read alone, it is the most political of the three Lalu novels. Read as the trilogy's end, in the combined edition introduced by Saros Cowasjee, it completes what S. Menon Marath called the finest of Anand's works.

Scholarship keeps returning to it for a specific reason: it is one of the earliest Indian novels to put an organised peasant movement, with its sabha, its speeches and its defeat, at the centre of a fiction, and students of the Oudh rising still read it beside Nehru's own account. With this volume, the Kosh now holds the Lalu trilogy entire: The Village, Across the Black Waters and The Sword and the Sickle.