Mulk Raj Anand writes about the Indians much as Chekhov writes about the Russians, or Sean O’Faolain or Frank O’Conner write about the Irish. At the time his manner is quite his own… Mr. Anand’s writing has an attractive sensuous quality. He somehow charges his pages with heat, colour, scents (or smells). He has, most of all, the touch, the power that makes the writer great he can give human weakness a dignity of its own.

Mulk Raj Anand, born in 1905, was educated at the University of Punjab and at the London University. He began his career by writing for T.S. Eliot’s Criterion and went on to win international fame with his heart warming portraits of the Indian landscape and its working class. Author of more than a dozen novels, short stories, and critical writings, including untouchable, coolie, private Life of an Indian Prince, seven Summers, Death of a Hero, and Lament on the Death of Master of Arts, he was honored with Sahitya Akademi Award, the most prestigious Indian Award for literary writing, in 1972. He has held the Tagore Chair at the Punjab University and was the chairman of Lalit Kala Academy.

The volume is remarkable for the variety of its inspiration the virtues of a humorous appreciation of life little ironies and a sympathetic understanding of its tragedies is conveyed with a truly poetic intensity.