Homage to Spain

This document, “Homage to Spain”, is the speech that Mulk Raj Anand delivered on behalf of the Indian Origin Writers Association at the Congress of the International Association of Writers for the Defense of Culture held at Valencia in July 1937.

Mulk Raj Anand (1905-2004), an editor, journalist, and professor, was one of the pioneers of Indian writing in English. Based in England from 1924 to 1945, he studied at the University of Cambridge for a Ph.D in philosophy in 1929. 

His important novels include Untouchable (1935) and Coolie (1936) written in the social realist style. In November 1934 he co-founded the Indian Progressive Writers Association, which was closely aligned with Nehruvian nationalism and leftism. He participated in the World Congress of Writers against Fascism in 1935 in Madrid and again in Valencia in 1937. For around three months in 1937, he served with the International Brigades in the trenches at Madrid’s University City. 

As a self-styled war correspondent, Anand wrote for the Congress Socialist and National Front. In his essays he compared the Indian peasants suffering from caste and colonial prejudice to those in Spain. This comparison, and one between great contemporary Spanish and Indian writers, appears in his address to the Valencia congress.

There are some of us in Asia who have looked to Europe for the inspiration and fecundation of a new consciousness… And it is because we in India have believed that Western culture is in large measure synonymous with European culture that we stand aghast today at the betrayal by the forces of reaction that we had come to regard in alliance with the progressive forces of Western society as the common heritage… The survival of folk elements in the poetry of feudal peninsula India feel a close affinity in Lorca and Rabindranath Tagore, for instance, is indicative of the striking similarity in the modes of expression under feudalism as it operates in India and Spain. Whatever the distance that divides us from Spain, we the writers of  feudal peninsular India feel a close affinity with the writers of Spain. We have suffered and are still suffering the tortures of that hell which the egotism and self aggrandizement of the few inflicts upon the vast masses of the people in all countries under the domination of monopoly capitalism. And because the problem of the agrarian masses of India is not unlike that which has forced the Spanish peasants from emerging from feudalism, since both have for centuries been oppressed by a rapacious landlordism, since both are face to face with the brutal tyranny of an upper class anxious to secure its privileges and possessions even if that involves the extermination of the whole of mankind.

MS/AT