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Anurag Chauhan
Mulk Raj Anand on Colonialism, Society and Human Life in The Two Lady Rams
If one who slays one is a murderer, then he who slays a thousand is not a hero.
“Long years ago, we made a tryst with destiny, and now the time comes when we shall redeem our pledge, not wholly or in full measure, but very substantially. At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom.”
This is an excerpt from Jawaharlal Nehru's Tryst with Destiny speech that he gave on August 15, 1947, when India became an independent nation, free from the vile rule of the British Raj.
Like India, many nations we see today flourishing were once living a dreaded life with an uncertain future. Many greats, like Mahatma Gandhi, strived and burned themselves into the fire of struggle to earn their nation the gold of freedom.
One great who stabbed in the chest of the colonial mindset with the precision of his pen was Mulk Raj Anand (1905-2004). His two of the most famous works include “Untouchable” (1935) and “Coolie” (1936).
His unique blend of wit, critique and humour with the sparkles of Indianness in his writings made him popular as India's Charles Dickens. Anand won the International Peace Prize given by the World Peace Council in 1953, along with many national and international accolades over the years.
"The Two Lady Rams" by Mulk Raj Anand
In his short story “The Two Lady Rams”, Mulk Raj Anand lays out the personal life of Lalla Jhinda Ram and the strife between his two wives over the right to go to the Garden Party for the investiture ceremony for the award of Knighthood to Lalla Jhinda Ram.
Anand unveils the backdrop of this chaos in his own unique way, with a blend of humour, satire and criticism. His knack for drawing lines over the subtleties of the matter creates an impressive silhouette of the irony of the British Raj in India and how the private lives of its subjects were strikingly in contrast to their annals of glorious enslavement of millions of human souls.
The Poverty of Colonialism
The story revolves around Lalla Jhinda Ram, who is chosen to be conferred with the title of knighthood by his Majesty the King Emperor (or whichever Government department that acted on His Majesty’s behalf) for his “sundry services to the British Empire”, but things turn upside down when the invitation to attend the Garden Party at the residence of His Excellency the Governor for the investiture ceremony came to his house.
Because the invitation was only for Sir Jhinda and Lady Ram, Lalla Jhinda Ram only asked his younger wife to buy a new sari and to get ready for the party. When the news travelled through the servants to the part of the house where the old wife, Sukhi, was segregated, it was just like blowing on the spark that already existed between the twenty-five-year-old and fifty-year-old females of the house.
Mulk Raj Anand’s intent behind displaying the domestic episode of a husband resolving the conflict between his two wives is to fabricate a critique of the British Raj in India as “though it possessed of fairly well-documented and social opinion of almost all notable persons as well as notorieties and particularly about the services rendered to the Sarkar by them, is singularly inept and formal about the human details of their lives.”
Of course, there is no way in which His Majesty the King Emperor, sitting seven thousand miles away from India, can ever get to know anything about the private lives of his subjects.
Mulk Raj Anand forges a mockery of the “great” monarchical governance of the British Raj, where it drew sustenance from distributing titles, bribe-taking, and letting state functionaries manage support from India’s wheeler-dealers — shopkeepers, traders, contractors, middlemen, brokers, etc.
Patriarchy: Perpetuating the Prosperity
Mulk Raj Anand builds up the foundation of the story based on the typical patriarchal scenario where the man makes arrangements for the upkeep of both the wives but showers love and care only on the younger one.
Anand intimates that Lalla Jhinda Ram married a second time while the first wife was still alive in order to “perpetuate the race since Sukhi, the first wife, was barren.”
For the English, who still allowed the Hindu Mitakshara Law (The principle of convention) to be practised side by side with the Indian Penal Code which they had imposed, and who, therefore, allowed a man to marry three or four wives, had made no ruling whether all or any of these wives could assume the title of Lady in case the husband was suddenly raised to a Knighthood or Viscountcy, or Earldom, Dukedom or anything like that.
The elder wife brought a lot of dowry with her, which made Jhinda Ram embark on the journey of his social success and eventually to the title of “Knighthood”, while the second wife Shakuntala had only her charms and a fair complexion to boast of.
You (Lalla Jhinda Ram) had nothing before I brought a lakh of rupees in my dowry!... What did this bitch bring with her — nothing but a fair complexion and a snub nose.
Mulk Raj Anand instils a sense of irony with his choice of names that he gave to the characters as the first wife’s Sukhi brought “sukh” (prosperity) to Lalla Jhinda Ram in the form of big dowry and uplifted the living standards as a result.
The second wife Shakuntala introduced romance — as the Shakuntala of Dushyant-Shakuntala legend inspired the sense of love in King Dushyant to the extent that he forgot all sense of propriety of Kingly behaviour and spent time with the young Ashramite incognito. He even went on to marry her according to the ancient marriage tradition of “Gandharva Vivah”.
The Milking of Hierarchy
It was both unprecedented and surprising for Jhinda Ram to get the hint for solving the puzzle of the awful domestic predicament through his chauffeur.
After getting hushed away from the gates of His Excellency the Governor (yet another critique of the hollow titles of the British Raj), Jhinda Ram’s chauffeur said, “Maharaj, forgive me who is not good enough to clean the dust of your shoes… But why don’t you take both the Bibis to the Party?”
Jhinda Ram gruffly dismissed the driver by ordering him to mind his own business. But in his heart, he thought how obvious and simple a solution to the whole problem was.
Why, if he could marry two wives in law, he certainly ought to have a right to call them both Lady Rams.
“Ohe”, he called the chauffeur, “Go tell both the Bibis to get ready for the Garden Party. And get my bearer to serve my tiffin.”
Anand here brings up the classist order of the society with the shrewd use of other characters of the story as well, as in the episode of the chauffeur, by first dismissing him with his idea but later on making him do that very same thing for him with his clever duplicity.
Also, the description of Jhinda Ram’s bungalow, where separate parts of the house were allocated to the two wives and “their different households (were) attended by servants who all lived a common life in a row of one-roomed houses outside the bungalow”, evokes the same sense of differentiation.
The Pillars of Pretence
Mulk Raj Anand has presented and summarized, through the story of Lalla Jhinda Ram and his two wives, the Two Lady Rams, the ironical and superficial character and governance of the British Raj in India and made a mockery of the sense of respect that they used to give to those who were gullible and exploitable in the name of honours and titles.
The dark silhouette of the empire on which the sun never sets casted the shadow of its brutish ambitions to civilize the whole world, over the innocence of other people. Anand illustrates, with his seemingly trivial plot of a domestic tragedy, the roots of a great tree who deluded the people to eat its low-hanging fruits of hypnotizing malice.
For they (Sir Jhinda Ram and The Two Lady Rams) are three staunch pillars of the Raj which has conceded to them privileges unknown in the annals of the Angrezi Sarkar of India.
With his sharp wit and sense of humour, Anand sprinkles the story with the comedy of human relationships and domestic life. The journey of Lalla Jhinda Ram becoming Sir Jhinda Ram is filled with the scenes of a vicious circle of one’s desire for recognition and power, where every other person is there just to prove to be of some use to another.
Read and Contemplate on Francis Bacon's empiricist dissection of love in his essay "Of Love"; then on James Allen's illustration on how thoughts lead to our Spiritual Transformation; and the ironical display of the social justice dogma by George Orwell in his "Animal Farm".
Get your own copy of Mulk Raj Anand's “The Two Lady Rams” from here.
