A significant part of literary production consists of the rewriting of popular currents or of cultural accounts such as folk tales and myths. These rewritings may take the form of dedicated praise or of critical evaluation. But either way, such acts of literary remembrance contribute in a very specific manner to the ongoing debates and contestations within the political space, especially when the atmosphere is of instability and conflict. By utilising fiction to comprehend the working of politics, this paper intends to locate the archetype of the Jungian ‘hero’ in Mulk Raj Anand's ‘Lalu trilogy’, comprising of ‘The Village’ (1939), ‘Across the Black Waters’ (1940) and ‘The Sword and the Sickle’ (1942). It presents the idiosyncrasies of the journey that according to Jung, the hero undergoes, as he strives to achieve the fullest possible consciousness of his personality. This journey, it is emphasised, is analogous to that of the protagonist Lal Singh in Anand's trilogy. The objective is to understand the psychology implicit in the layers of fictional texts, which in turn helps us ease our way into making sense of the political churnings in Indian society during the 1930s and 1940s.
Fiction, Archetypes, Hero, Individuation
