Envisioning Human Rights Through Literary Texts (Selected) of Mulk Raj Anand and Munshi Premchand

on December 10, 1948 to prevent atrocities in various spheres.All human beings do not enjoy basic rights.They are discriminated on various grounds.The violation of human rights has been reflected in literature from various angles.When India was not established as an independent entity and UDHR was yet to be adopted, people were deprived of their rights in different ways.Since culture of human rights exists in multiple forms, it is important to examine the texts written during pre-independence.The aim is to locate the culture of human rights during that time, the way contemporary writers envisioned it through literary representations and how that could contribute to the critique of the violation of human rights.It could work as a pretext to unpack the post-independent human rights narratives as well.Indian writing in English has focused on the violation of human rights through various means of discrimination among which class-caste hierarchy is a crucial one.It has been an ever-present theme in literary texts.Untouchability is one of the crucial aspects of the violation of human rights.The present paper attempts to examine the envisioning of human rights through a qualitative evaluation of the literary texts by Mulk Raj Anand (1905-2004) and Munshi Premchand (1880-1936).Both the writers were writing at a time when India was under the colonial rule.The paper attempts to focus on Mulk Raj Anand's novel Untouchable (1935) and Coolie (1936) and some of the selected short stories of Premchand to examine human rights from the lens of Indian literary community.