Contested lands: Agriculture and war under empire in Mulk Raj Anand’s Punjab Trilogy

Abstract

The novels of Mulk Raj Anand’s Punjab Trilogy juxtapose crises of agrarian experience in British held India with those of global warfare. The three novels feature epistemologies of land that were the basis of conflict at the beginning of the twentieth century, from land as property to be owned or conquered to places offering comfort, sustenance, and belonging. Contextualized in scholarship on materialism and the somatic in Anand’s work, this article examines the material interactions of land, flora, fauna, and bodies in the trilogy. It considers the role of shared sensory, emotional, and cognitive relationships to the land as a means of fostering human connection across forms of difference prior to the subaltern protagonist’s access to political ideas and discourses.