SOURCE: "The Sources of Protest in My Novels," in The Literary Criterion, Vol. XVIII, No. 4, 1983, pp. 1-12.

In the following essay, Anand discusses the artistic principles that informed his novels and the relationship between his life and writings.

Various studies of my novels by scholars have, in recent years, confirmed what I tried to show in the autobiography of my ideas, Apology for Heroism, as also in the autobiographical novels, that there has always been an emergent connection between my life and my writings, throughout my creative career.

Of course, some critics have interpreted my obsession with truthful presentation of the realities of life as ideological. Quite a few members of our academic intellegentsia are addicted to terms like classicism, romanticism, realism, and naturalism, which make for abstract analysis of novels. They often ignore the pressure of human life, the compulsion of which on the writer's conscience, may...