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The character of Bakha, in Anand’s Untouchable, is drawn from the lowest caste in Indian society, that of sweeper, or cleaner of human ordure. Despite his unpromising station in life, the central figure in the novel operates at a variety of levels in order to critique the status quo of caste in India. Well aware of his position at the nadir of Indian society, Bakha is able-via his untouchability-to interrogate issues well above his station in life, such as caste and its inequities, economics and the role of the colonizer. Due to the very characteristics of the character's position, Anand is able to examine issues such as society’s revulsion at untouchablility; some local, innate societal sympathy for Bakha's plight, and the fact that in the 1930s Gandhi used his Harijans-untouchables-as a symbol for change in Indian society. This essay examines the modes by which Anand deploys mimicry and the carnivalesque to critique Indian society in the 1930s.
The author has constructed a mimic-man, fundamentally carnivalesque in the Bakhtinian sense, who is simultaneously parodic and subversive. Indeed, the linguistic similarity Bakha/Bakhtin is in itself superficial yet tempting. For Bakhtin, "Carnivalesque literature uses elements of parody, mimicry, bodily humour and grotesque display to achieve the ends of carnival, that is, to jostle ‘from below’ the univocal, elevated language of high art and decorous society".
The cover of the 3rd Edn. of V.T. Rajshekar's Dalit: The Black Untouchables of India. ISBN: 0-932863-05-1
During the course of his day, Bakha causes widespread unease, not merely at his physical presence. Although he is aware of the "six thousand years of racial and class superiority"(16) that bears down on him, as he wanders the alleys of Bulashah, he repeatedly and emphatically "jostles ‘from below’". Although he knows that it is "a presumption on the part of the poor to smoke like the rich people"(42) he nevertheless is seen as "a happy, carefree man as he sauntered along, drawing the smoke and breathing it out"(43). Firmly placed by caste at the bottom of society, he is aware of its taboos, and yet cheerfully breaks out of these strictures. Later, when attacked by the crowd for inadvertently touching a man in the street, the insecurities of caste are exposed. One old man says, "These swine are getting more and more uppish!" (48). This theme is developed when Bakha is in the silversmiths’ alley, and the lady observes that "they are a superior lot these days!… They are getting more and more uppish."(74). This is no less than Hamlet’s lament that "the age is grown so picked that the toe of the peasant comes so near the heel of the courtier he galls his kibe"(Act V Sc I). The parallels between the carnivalesque gravedigger scene from Hamlet and the episode in the alley are irresistible, with both the Prince of Denmark and the housewife bemoaning a perceived threat to the social order from punning, articulate, discourteous persons of lowly rank. Elevated rank can only exist in opposition to-and in the light of-the servile, and when the lowly refuse to offer civility then the highborn can only assume the advent of chaos.
Bakha poses more than a mere verbal or religious threat to society. Anand dwells on his physicality, describing him as "strong and able-bodied"(9) and "A superb specimen of humanity"(65). When the crowd at the temple sees him, "it seemed to show its heels as it saw the giant stride of the sweeper advance frighteningly"(62), and he "looked ruthless"(62). Due to the physical nature of his occupation, although reduced to begging for food, he is a powerful figure.
Dr. B.R. Ambedkar, 1891-1956. Champion of Dalit rights, and regarded as the movement's chief protagonist. These are his words: "My final words of advice to you is educate, agitate and organise; have faith in yourself. With justice on our side I do not see how we can lose our battle. For ours is a battle not for wealth or for power. It is a battle for freedom. It is a battle for the reclamation of the human personality".
As a result of the restrictions society has placed around the untouchable, he has the ability, no matter how unconscious or undesired, to determine the course of other peoples’ lives. The man in the street that Bakha touches is forced to acknowledge the disruption caused by the sweeper. He will have to "go and take a bath", and laments that he will be late for his "business"(47). Bakha is a disruptive carnivalesque figure at the level of the religious, physical and societal. Free to roam the streets at will, he has the ability, no matter how unconscious or unacknowledged, to influence events well above his caste position.
The contempt in which society holds him is at once disabling and enabling. The very characteristics that caste has thrust on his life allow this mimic-man a great deal of freedom to observe while remaining unseen. His father takes a dim view of his activities, saying that all he does is: "Play, play, play and wander all day"(118). During the course of the day described Bakha dozes in the morning sun, chats with his friends, sleeps at the silversmith’s alley, watches religious rites at a Hindu temple, plays hockey, meets a Christian missionary and is present at a gathering addressed by Gandhi. This is not a criticism of Anand’s depiction of a day in the life of a sweeper; rather it is to illustrate the liberating effects of his profession. Because no one of superior status will hold discourse with him-and it is the reality of untouchable life that this is just about everyone-Bakha is free to move anywhere virtually invisibly.
Because of his close contact with the British army, Bakha has an "ambition to live like an Englishman"(22). This project requires him to acquire broken European furniture for his father’s house and dress in "regulation overcoat, breeches, puttees and ammunition boots of the military uniform"(10). Yet he knows that "except for his English clothes there was nothing English in his life"(12). But this dress has the effect of rendering him as other from his own society; this is indicated by the distancing trope of repeatedly describing his peers as "they" and "their". He is simultaneously of his race yet deracinated by his contact with the colonizer. Ashcroft quotes Bhabha as he examines "the process by which the colonized subject is reproduced as ‘almost the same, but not quite’"(140). Bakha demonstrates this as he at once mimics, but does not achieve, the effect of the clothing as worn by the Dogra and Sikh sepoys. As Ashcroft et al observe, mimicry can result in a "blurred copy’ of the colonizer that can be quite threatening"(139).
Characters other than Bakha are worthy of examination. Mr. R.N. Bashir, B.A. (Oxon.), is the paradigm of "almost the same but not white"(141). His companion, the poet, angrily points out that the barrister can only "slavishly copy the English in everything"(154). The lawyer is a hybridized figure, educated at the seat of English educational power, dressed in the "most smartly-cut English suit"(150), and yet centrally un-English. Crucially, Bakha cannot discern what he is looking at when he sees Bashir, for he "was wondering who the man could be, too sallow-faced for an Englishman, too white for an Indian"(151). Here Anand is highlighting the fact that a slavish copy of a racial stereotype can only result in failure; that the harder one tries, the further one moves from the desired original. Ironically, Bashir is forced to fall back on attempting to replicate the "wrong Hindustani spoken by the English"(151) in order to try to appear as English as possible. Bashir is the apotheosis of the figure anticipated by Macaulay in his Minute on Indian Education: "We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect"(430). As a description of Bashir, this could not be bettered. Clearly, Macaulay’s ambitions have been carried out to the letter. The English have produced their own mimic-man, tasked to do their bidding, as a white man, yet emphatically never a white man.
Anand (pictured, left) examines the depredations caused by colonisation. By contact with the British, Bakha rejects his own culture, seeing the colonizer as "superior people"(11), and guarding his new English clothes from "all base taint of Indianness"(12). Any contact with the colonizer distorts and renders the cultural aboriginal as other. This is not to open the debate on authenticity, rather to consider that any transplantation of cultures results in distortion of native ways of life. He learns a distaste for excessive jewellery from the English; he becomes "ashamed of the Indian way of performing ablutions"(18), and begins to view other untouchables as "his inferiors"(35). Pictures of European women are seen as "beautiful"(42), and even his musical sensibilities are changed. While in the cantonment he hears British army bandsmen playing "harmonies"(69); but this contact renders his own native music as "tuneless wails, weird and disturbing"(69). Bakha is a rational, questioning sentient being, who has been deracinated and altered utterly by contact with the colonizer; as the narrator indicates, he has "grown out of his surroundings"(100). Via the sweeper, Anand highlights the debilitating effects of empire on the aborigine.
This sense of alienation does not apply only to the native. Colonel Hutchinson, the missionary, is a man for whom caste and national loyalty is a problematic issue. Again, dress is deployed as a key symbol of otherness. Eccentrically, for an Englishman, he wore a "a white turban"(121). Through mixing with the natives he had "lost some of the glamour attaching to the superior, remote and reticent Englishmen"(123). The Colonel protests that he is like Bakha, in that he is a padre of the Salvation Army (124). Bakha fails to understand "the subtle distinction which the Colonel was trying to institute between himself and the ordinary sahibs in India whose haughtiness and vulgarity was, to his Christian mind, shameful"(124-5). It seems that for Anand, kinship and nationality are frequently deferred, elusive and personal.
Dislocation and cultural uncertainty are a leitmotif of Untouchable. Frequently, Anand uses dress as a symbol of cultural heterogeneity. Ram Charan is "dressed in a rather contradictory style of Eastern and Western habiliments"(91); in the bazaar the crowd wears "varied, rather hybrid clothes, neither English nor Indian"(66). Although Untouchable is a novel about India, Anand resists notions of an authentic ur-India, preferring instead to evoke images of mixing and hybridity. Clothing, for him, is at once a signifier of country, profession and culture, yet simultaneously it is signally and radically open to interpretation and change.
In a small space, the author presents a world where notions that are frequently regarded as immutable are seen as mobile. Foregrounding uncertain nationality, class and caste position, Anand calls for an inclusive society, free of the crippling dogma that surrounds it. Untouchable's central message is that Bakha, and all untouchables, should lift their "heads to the sky"(72). Literature in isolation is not capable of changing society, and via the images in this essay it must become obvious to the reader-seventy years after the book's first publication-that untouchability and caste still exist today in India. Nevertheless, Anand's text strikes a blow for untouchability, albeit in a small space. In only 157 pages, and one Joycean textual day, the author has foregrounded a remarkable breadth of issues, and it is only to be hoped that one day this text will be regarded as a useful tool in a past campaign, rather than as part of a continuing and unfinished project.
This project was completed under the direction of Dr Leon Litvack as a requirement for the MA Degree in Modern Literary Studies in the School of English at the Queen's University of Belfast. The site is evolving and will include contributions from future generations of MA students on other writers and themes.
Dalit Liberation Education Trust: http://www.pcsadvt.com/dlet
The Imperial Archive. http://www.qub.ac.uk/english/imperial/imperial.htm
India Survey, Biography: http://www.indiasurvey.com/biodata/mulkrajanand.htm
Literature in English of the Indian Subcontinent in the Postcolonial Web: http://landow.stg.brown.edu/post/india/anand/anandov.html
Anand, Mulk Raj Untouchable London: Penguin Books, 1940
Ashcroft, Bill, Griffiths, Gareth, and Tiffin, Helen. Key Concepts in Post-Colonial Studies. London: Routledge, 1998.
Ashcroft, Bill, Griffiths, Gareth, and Tiffin, Helen. The Post-Colonial Studies Reader. London: Routledge, 1995.
This project was completed under the direction of Dr Leon Litvack as a requirement for the MA degree in Modern Literary Studies in the School of English at the Queen's University of Belfast. The site is evolving and will include contributions from future generations of MA students on other writers and themes.
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