Two Short Novels

Saros Cowasjee's laudatory proposal to bring forth a commemorative volume of Mulk Raj Anand's two short novels, Lament on the Death of a Master of Arts and Death of a Hero, on his birthday will undoubtedly help readers to get acquainted with another challenging side of the celebrated author of Untouchable and Coolie.

While Lament on the Death of a Master of Arts, takes us back to the British colonial India of the modernist era of the thirties, Death of a Hero brings us face to face with the historical realities of the beginnings of free India.

Lament is a poetic dirge on the philosophies of pain, loss and grief, but Death as an epitaph is Anand's poetic aside on liberty and the function of the poet as reformer and legislator.