Select Novels of Mulk Raj Anand and Charles Dickens: A Comparative Study of Crime, Prison, and Injustice

Abstract

This paper presents a comparative analysis of representations of crime, penal systems, and administrative justice in selected works by Charles Dickens and Mulk Raj Anand. While Dickens, the quintessential Victorian social critic, dissects the hypocrisies and failures of England’s domestic legal and penal institutions, Anand, a pioneer of Indian Anglophone literature, exposes these same systems as tools of colonial subjugation and caste-based oppression in India. Through close readings of Dickens's Oliver Twist, Great Expectations, and Bleak House, and Anand's Untouchable, Coolie, and Two Leaves and a Bud, this study argues that both authors converge in portraying the “criminal” as a social victim and the justice system as inherently unjust. However, they diverge fundamentally in their narrative stance and ultimate vision: Dickens, writing from within the system, seeks moral reform and individual redemption, whereas Anand, writing from the colonial periphery, advocates for the system’s complete dismantling through collective resistance. Employing theoretical frameworks from Michel Foucault and postcolonial theory, this paper concludes that the “cells” in both corpora function dually—as literal prisons and as the constitutive units of a diseased social body.