Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable

The last few weeks, my bedtime reading has been another novel I found in the marvelous book storage room at school: Untouchable, published in 1935. It was Mulk Raj Anand’s debut novel, written in English, and it marked the beginning of Anand’s use of literature to argue against the British colonial presence in India as well as aspects of social inequality within Indian society, notably the caste system.

Untouchable traces one day in the life of Bakha, whose position as a sweeper places him at the very bottom of the pervasive and intractable social hierarchy. Bakha has inherited his job of cleaning toilets, courtyards, and streets from his father, with whom he has a tumultuous relationship, and in the novel he suffers indignity after indignity. In an early episode, he accidentally brushes against a high-caste man in a busy street, and angry pedestrians surround him, publicly haranguing him for not having shouted to warn that he was coming.

Bakha is given a full and complex life in the novel, with the pangs of love, the challenges of friendship, the anger at the system that holds him in bondage, while also having deeply internalized that system, lowering himself, believing in his own badness. To read, it was shocking and saddening, and I found it really moving also from a historical perspective–Indian writers I have read before have been working with post-independence India; Anand is writing during the Indian independence movement, and the relationships between Indian and British societies are explored differently here than in, for example, Midnight’s Children–I think of the brief description in Untouchable of the British policeman, who is the one with political power in the scene yet so clearly outside of it, a silent observer.

These final pages of the novel take us explicitly into the realms of politics, economics, technology, and philosophy, as Bakha finds himself attending a speech by Mahatma Gandhi and then listening to a followup conversation by two high-caste, educated Indian men, one of whom is highly Anglicized, the other holding closer to Indian culture. In these scenes we can see Anand engaging with the political questions of the anti-colonial movement, pitting different perspectives against one another of the right way forward for Indian society. Something I was struck by was the great sense of celebrity that Anand paints around Gandhi–his arrival at the speech venue is an enormous event, and the awe-struck audience is clamoring so much to get near him that it is difficult to get his car up to the stage.

I’ll share a passage from the novel, an early episode in which the focus shifts away from Bakha to his sister. Sohini. Sohini has gone to collect water, but as an untouchable, she is not allowed to draw it from the well. Although the water is right there, Sohini and the other outcastes must wait for a higher-caste person to deign to pour water into their pitchers. The result is that even basic necessities like water are controlled by caste, and because so many are waiting for the water, Sohini can never get enough–she is lucky to get one pitcher-full.

Luckily for the crowd of outcastes, however, there was another man coming a little way behind, no less a person than Pundit Kali Nath, one of the priests in charge of the temple in the town.. The crowd repeated their entreaties with more vehemence than before.

The Pundit hesitated, twitched his eyebrows and looked at the group frowning with the whole of his bony, hollow-cheeked, deeply-furrowed face. The appeal seemed, even to his dry-as-dust self, irresistible. But he was an ill-humoured old devil, and had it not been that, as he stood and reflected, he realised that the exercise at the well might do some good to the chronic constipation from which he suffered, he would not have consented to help the outcastes.

He moved slowly on to the brick platform of the well. His small, cautious steps and the peculiar contortions of his face showed that he was a prey to a morbid preoccupation with his inside. He took his own time to prepare for the task he had undertaken. He seemed to be immersed in thought, but was really engrossed in the rumblings in his belly. 'That rice,' he thought, 'the rice I ate yesterday, that must be responsible. My stomach seems jammed. Or was it the sweet jalebis I ate with my milk at the confectioner's? But the food at the home of Lalla Banarsi Das may have introduced complications.' He recalled the taste of the various delicacies to which he was so often treated by the pious. 'How nice and sweet is the milk-rice pudding, sticking to the white teeth and lingering in the mouth. And kara parshad, the semolina pudding; the hot, buttery masses of it melt almost as you put a morsel of it in the mouth. But the hubble-bubble usually keeps my stomach clean. What happened to this morning's smoke? I smoked for an hour to no effect. Strange!' During the time taken by these cogitations he had placed the brass jug in his hand to rest in a little hollow in the wooden frame of the well. The waiting crowd thought that it was the Brahmin's disgust at serving them, the outcastes, that brought such deep wrinkles on his face and made it look peeved and angry. They didn't realise that it was constipation and a want of vigour in his lanky little limbs.  They soon realised this, for as, after a great many hesitant steps, he tied the iron can that lay near the frame to an edge of the hemp rope that skirted the pulley-wheel, and gently lowered it into the well, the handle slipped from his hand, because of the weight of the bucket, and revolved violently back, releasing all the coils of ripe that were around it. He was a bit scared by the suddenness of the motion of the wheel. Then he pulled himself together and renewed his attack. But he was soon upset again. To draw out a can, full of water, required limbs which had been used to exercise more strenuous than the Pundit had ever performed.

Irony is the central driver here, as it is for most of the depictions of high-caste characters in the novel. The Pundit should be a holy person concerned with holy things, yet he spends most of his time thinking about the unsavory machinations of his body. Indeed, he has deigned to help the outcastes not out of any altruistic motive but because he thinks the physical activity might ease his constipation. The sweepers are judged unclean because their work puts them into contact with human waste, but it is the high-caste Pundit who seems to be most concerned with his relationship to dung. We also have the irony that the rich, ostentatious delicacies that the Pundit eats, these luxuries of high status, are the very cause of his indigestion. The suggestion is that it is this high-caste man who is the dirty one, not the outcastes waiting for water.

The irony extends beyond the character himself–the Pundit is the only person present who is allowed to touch the well, yet he is physically unable to raise the bucket of water. The Untouchables, whose work involves physical labor, are often described in the novel as strapping and fit–these are the people who could easily draw the water up if they were permitted to, but instead tradition forces them to rely on this infirm priest who is only serving them the water out of his own selfish reasons.

The contrast between high-caste and untouchable, between the edible delicacies of the Pundit and the untouchables’ restriction from the basic supply of water, the affluence and the poverty, the Pundit’s physical weakness and his social strength, all of these combine to show the ridiculousness and injustice of the situation.

There are questions in the novel that I don’t yet understand. So many characters, including Bakha, seek to mimic the British colonizers–Bakha prizes cast-off clothes from British soldiers that he keeps scrupulously clean and wears with pride, even though they are ill-suited to his daily life. The latter part of the novel then seems to impugn this mimicry of the colonizers, but this idea never seems to change its meaning for Bakha. I wonder about the complexities here, of these interactions between colonizer and colonized. What is Anand arguing about them? Similarly, what is Anand’s final judgement of Gandhi’s philosophy–the speech he gives is evaluated piece by piece by Bakha, some affirming, some aspects frustrating and out-of-touch, many of the ideas inaccessible to Bakha.

I also wonder about Anand’s position as a high-caste person with a British education writing from the perspective of an Untouchable. E.M. Forster wrote in his preface to the novel that “Untouchable could only have been written by an Indian, and by an Indian who observed from the outside. No European, however sympathetic, could have created the character of Bakha, because he would not have known enough about his troubles. And no Untouchable could have written the book, because he would have been involved in indignation and self-pity.” Forster’s assessment seems patronizing and reductive, and indeed, in my (minimal) reading about critical reception of Untouchable, it sounds like one of the criticisms of the novel has been that it essentializes and homogenizes the experience of a huge and diverse group of people. It brings to mind those questions of what it means to write from another’s point of view, what can we write well and how, and what is beyond our ken.

I hope there has been something interesting in these meandering reflections. I certainly would recommend Untouchable. I’m going to keep exploring that book room and beyond, see what else I find beyond the mainstay canons of British and American literature.

Best wishes in the coming weeks,
Jimmy