The Trilogy is a story of the transformation of a man and a nation on an epic scale. The three novels comprising this trilogy — namely The Village, Across the Black Waters and The Sword and the Sickle — unfold a saga of changing India, from one characterised by oppressive, stagnant life to one where one can dream dreams.

Lal Singh, nicknamed Lalu, is a Sikh peasant youth who feels stifled by the endless petty tyrannies of Indian village life, mired in poverty, debt and social rigidity. Rebellious and free-spirited, Lalu flees from an unjust imminent arrest, finding refuge by enlisting in the army in the midst of World War 1.

Hastily trained, Lalu's regiment is pitchforked from rustic Punjab into the soul-grinding trench warfare in France. But France also provides Lalu a new window to the life and world of a free people. Upon returning home, Lalu is demobilised from the army in disgrace — and without the reward of a piece of land of his own to till upon which he had set his heart. Angry and rootless, he elopes with his childhood sweetheart and is fortuitously drawn into India's gathering independence movement. Now socially and politically aware, Lalu proves himself to be a natural political organizer of the peasantry. Through the tumult and din of protests and arrests, Lalu grows dimly aware of the meaning and possibility of freedom, and the coming of a new dawn.

The Trilogy is scripted on a vast canvas and is peopled with an array of arresting characters, including Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, soldiers Indian, English and German, petty officials, politicians, rich landlords and, most importantly, poor Indian peasants. Mulk Raj Anand vividly captures all the quite diverse smells, the air and nuances as the action moves from rural Punjab to the war trenches in France and on to India’s pre-Independence political heartland.

Mulk Raj Anand (1905-2004) was born in Peshawar and educated at the universities of Punjab and London. After earning his Ph.D. in Philosophy in 1929, Anand began writing notes for T. S. Eliot’s magazine Criterion as well as books on diverse subjects such as cooking and the arts. Recognition came with the publication of his first two novels, Untouchable (1935) and Coolie (1936). These were followed, among others, by his well-known trilogy The Village (1939), Across the Black Waters (1940) and The Sword and the Sickle (1942). By the time he returned to India in 1946, he was the best-known Indian writer abroad.

Making Bombay (now Mumbai) his home and centre of activity, Anand plunged with gusto into India’s cultural and social life. Writing remained, however, his main pre-occupation, and in 1953 he published Private Life of an Indian Prince — his finest literary achievement. In 1980 appeared his best non-fictional work, Conversations in Bloomsbury (revised ed. 2011) — a wide-ranging dialogue with T. S. Eliot, Aldous Huxley, Virginia Woolf and others. He also founded and edited the renowned Indian art magazine Marg, and worked ceaselessly on his monumental autobiographical fiction, The Seven Ages of Man.

A recipient of the Sahitya Akademi award, the Padma Bhushan and several honorary doctorates, Anand's complete papers are now housed in the National Archives of India in New Delhi.