UNTOUCHABLE
PENGUIN TWENTIETH-CENTURY CLASSICS
UNTOUCHABLE
Mulk Raj Anand, one of the most highly regarded Indian novelists writing in English, was born in Peshawar in 1905. He was educated at the universities of Lahore, London and Cambridge, and lived in England for many years, finally settling in a village in Western India after the war. His main concern has always been for ‘the creatures in the lower depths of Indian society who once were men and women: the rejected, who had no way to articulate their anguish against the oppressors’. His novels on humanism have been translated into several world languages.
The fiction-factions include Untouchable (1935), Coolie (1936), Two Leaves and a Bud (1937), The Village (1939), Across the Black Waters (1940), The Sword and the Sickle (1942) – and the much acclaimed Private Life of an Indian Prince (1953). His autobiographical novels, Seven Summers (1950), Morning Face (1968), which won the National Academy Award, Confession of a Lover (1972) and The Bubble (1988), reveal the story of his experiments with truth and the struggle of his various egos to attain a possible higher self.
‘One of the most eloquent and imaginative works to deal with this difficult and emotive subject’ Martin Seymour-Smith on Untouchable
MULK RAJ ANAND
UNTOUCHABLE
Penguin Books
The original edition of this novel was dedicated to
EDITH YOUNG
In this edition I add the names of
Perspirer K. S. SHELVANKAR
and
Inspirer MAHATMA GANDHI
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First published by Wishart 1935
Published in Penguin Books 1940
23
Copyright 1935 by Mulik Raj Anand
All rights reserved
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
ISBN: 978-0-14-195694-7
PREFACE
Some years ago, I came across a copy of a book by myself, A Passage to India, which had apparently been read by an indignant Colonel. He had not concealed his emotions. On the front page, he had written, ‘burn when done’, and lower down: ‘Has a dirty mind, see page 215’. I turned to page 215 with pardonable haste. There I found the words: ‘The sweepers of Chandrapur had just struck, and half the commodes remained desolate in consequence.’ This light-hearted remark has excluded me forever from military society ever since.
Well, if the Colonel thought A Passage to India dirty, what will he think about Untouchable, which describes a day in the life of a sweeper in an Indian city with every realistic circumstance. Is it a clean book or a dirty one ? Some readers, especially those who consider themselves all-white, will go purple in the face with rage before they have finished a dozen pages, and will exclaim that they cannot trust themselves to speak. I cannot trust myself either, though for a different reason : the book seems to me indescribably clean and I hesitate for words in which this can be conveyed. Avoiding rhetoric and circumlocution, it has gone straight to the heart of its subject and purified it. None of us are pure—we shouldn’t be alive if we were. But to the straightforward all things can become pure, and it is to the directness of his attack that Mr. Anand’s success is probably due.
What a strange business has been made of this business of the human body relieving itself ! The ancient Greeks did not worry about it, and they were the sanest and happiest of men. But both our civilisation and the Indian civilisation have got tied up in the most fantastic knots. Our own knot was only tied a hundred years ago, and some of us are hoping to undo it. It takes the form of prudishness and reticence; we have been trained from childhood to think excretion shameful, and grave evils have resulted, both physical and psychological, with which modern education is just beginning to cope. The Indian tangle is of a different kind. Indians, like most Orientals, are refreshingly frank; they have none of our complexes about functioning, they accept the process as something necessary and natural, like sleep. On the other hand they have evolved a hideous nightmare unknown to the west : the belief that the products are ritually unclean as well as physically unpleasant, and that those who carry them away or otherwise help to dispose of them are outcastes from society. Really, it takes the human mind to evolve anything so devilish. No animal could have hit on it. As one of Mr. Anand’s characters says : ‘ They think we are dirt because we clean their dirt.’
The sweeper is worse off than a slave, for the slave may change his master and his duties and may even become free, but the sweeper is bound for ever, born into a state from which he cannot escape and where he is excluded from social intercourse and the consolations of his religion. Unclean himself, he pollutes others when he touches them. They have to purify themselves, and to rearrange their plans for the day. Thus he is a disquieting as well as a disgusting object to the orthodox as he walks along the public roads, and it is his duty to call out and warn them that he is coming. No wonder that the dirt enters into his soul, and that he feels himself at moments to be what he is supposed to be. It is sometimes said that he is so degraded that he doesn’t mind, but this is not the opinion of those who have studied his case, nor is it borne out by my own slight testimony : I remember on my visits to India noticing that the sweepers were more sensitive-looking and more personable than other servants, and I knew one who had some skill as a poet.
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. Mr. Anand stands in the ideal position. By caste he is a Kshatriya, and he might have been expected to inherit the pollution-complex. But as a child he played with the children of the sweepers attached to an Indian regiment, he grew to be fond of them, and to understand a tragedy which he did not share. He has just the right mixture of insight and detachment, and the fact that he has come to fiction through philosophy has given him depth. It might have given him vagueness – that curse of the generalising mind – but his hero is no suffering abstraction. Bakha is a real individual, lovable, thwarted, sometimes grand, sometimes weak, and thoroughly Indian. Even his physique is distinctive ; we can recognise his broad intelligent face, graceful torso and heavy buttocks, as he does his nasty jobs, or stumps out in artillery boots in hopes of a pleasant walk through the city with a paper of cheap sweets in his hand.
The book is simply planned, but it has form. The action occupies one day, and takes place in a small area. The great catastrophe of the ‘ touching ’ (p. 46) occurs in the morning, and poisons all that happens subsequently, even such pleasant episodes as t
he hockey match and the country walk. After a jagged course of ups and downs, we come to the solution, or rather to the three solutions, with which the book closes. The first solution is that of Hutchinson, the Salvationist missionary : Jesus Christ. But though Bakha is touched at hearing that Christ receives all men, irrespective of caste, he gets bored, because the missionary cannot tell him who Christ is. Then follows the second solution, with the effect of a crescendo : Gandhi. Gandhi too says that all Indians are equal, and the account he gives of a Brahmin doing sweeper’s work goes straight to the boy’s heart. Hard upon this comes the third solution, put into the mouth of a modernist poet. It is prosaic, straightforward, and considered in the light of what has gone before in the book, it is very convincing. No god is needed to rescue the Untouchables, no vows of self-sacrifice and abnegation on the part of more fortunate Indians, but simply and solely – the flush system. Introduce water-closets and main-drainage throughout India, and all this wicked rubbish about untouchability will disappear. Some readers may find this closing section of the book too voluble and sophisticated, in comparison with the clear observation which has preceded it, but it is an integral part of the author’s scheme. It is the necessary climax, and it has mounted up with triple effect. Bakha returns to his father and his wretched bed, thinking now of the Mahatma, now of the Machine. His Indian day is over and the next day will be like it, but on the surface of the earth if not in the depths of the sky, a change is at hand.
E. M. FORSTER
UNTOUCHABLE
THE outcastes’ colony was a group of mud-walled houses that clustered together in two rows, under the shadow both of the town and the cantonment, but outside their boundaries and separate from them. There lived the scavengers, the leather-workers, the washermen, the barbers, the water-carriers, the grass-cutters and other outcastes from Hindu society. A brook ran near the lane, once with crystal-clear water, now soiled by the dirt and filth of the public latrines situated about it, the odour of the hides and skins of dead carcases left to dry on its banks, the dung of donkeys, sheep, horses, cows and buffaloes heaped up to be made into fuel cakes, and the biting, choking, pungent fumes that oozed from its sides. The absence of a drainage system had, through the rains of various seasons, made of the quarter a marsh which gave out the most offensive stink. And altogether the ramparts of human and animal refuse that lay on the outskirts of this little colony, and the ugliness, the squalor and the misery which lay within it, made it an ‘ uncongenial ’ place to live in.
At least so thought Bakha, a young man of eighteen, strong and able-bodied, the son of Lakha, the Jemadar1 of all the sweepers in the town and the cantonment, and officially in charge of the three rows of public latrines which lined the extremest end of the colony, by the brookside. But then he had been working in the barracks of a British regiment for some years on a sort of probation with a remote uncle and had been caught by the glamour of the ‘ white man’s ’ life. The Tommies had treated him as a human being and he had learnt to think of himself as superior to his fellow-outcastes. Otherwise, the rest of the outcastes, with the possible exception of Chota, the leather-worker’s son, who oiled his hair profusely, and parted it like the Englishmen on one side, wore a pair of shorts at hockey and smoked cigarettes like them, and of Ram Charan, the washerman’s son who aped Chota and Bakha in turn, were content with their lot.
Bakha thought of the uncongeniality of his home as he lay half awake in the morning of an autumn day, covered by a worn-out, greasy blanket, on a faded blue carpet which was spread on the floor in a corner of the twelve feet by five, dank, dingy, one-roomed mud-house. His sister slept on a cot next to him and his father and brother snored from under a patched, ochre-coloured quilt, on a broken string bed, further up.
The nights had been cold, as they always are in the town of Bulashah, as cold as the days are hot. And though, both during winter and summer, he slept with his day clothes on, the sharp, bitter wind that blew from the brook at dawn had penetrated to his skin, past the inadequate blanket, through the regulation overcoat, breeches, puttees and ammunition boots of the military uniform that clothed him.
He shivered as he turned on his side. But he didn’t mind the cold very much, suffering it willingly because he could sacrifice a good many comforts for the sake of what he called ‘ fashun,’ by which he understood the art of wearing trousers, breeches, coat, puttees, boots, etc., as worn by the British and Indian soldiers in India. ‘ You lover of your mother,’ his father had once abusively said to him, ‘ take a quilt, spread a bedding on a string bed, and throw away that blanket of the gora white men ; you will die of cold in that thin cloth.’ But Bakha was a child of modern India. The clear-cut styles of European dress had impressed his naïve mind. This stark simplicity had furrowed his old Indian consciousness and cut deep new lines where all the considerations which made India evolve a skirty costume as best fitted for the human body, lay dormant. Bakha had looked at the Tommies, stared at them with wonder and amazement when he first went to live at the British regimental barracks with his uncle. He had had glimpses, during his sojourn there, of the life the Tommies lived, sleeping on strange, low canvas beds covered tightly with blankets, eating eggs, drinking tea and wine in tin mugs, going to parade and then walking down to the bazaar with cigarettes in their mouths and small silver-mounted canes in their hands. And he had soon become possessed with an overwhelming desire to live their life. He had been told they were sahibs, superior people. He had felt that to put on their clothes made one a sahib too. So he tried to copy them in everything, to copy them as well as he could in the exigencies of his peculiarly Indian circumstances. He had begged one Tommy for the gift of a pair of trousers. The man had given him a pair of breeches which he had to spare. A Hindu sepoy, for the good of his own soul, had been kind enough to make an endowment of a pair of boots and puttees. For the other items he had gone down to the rag-seller’s shop in the town. He had long looked at that shop. Ever since he was a child he had walked past the wooden stall on which lay heaped the scarlet and khaki uniforms discarded or pawned by the Tommies, pith solar topees, peak caps, knives, forks, buttons, old books and other oddments of Anglo-Indian life. And he had hungered for the touch of them. But he had never mustered up courage enough to go up to the keeper of the shop and to ask him the price of anything, lest it should be a price he could not pay and lest the man should find out from his talk that he was a sweeper-boy. So he had stared and stared, stealthily noticing the variety of their queer, well-cut forms. ‘ I will look like a sahib,’ he had secretly told himself. ‘ And I shall walk like them. Just as they do, in twos, with Chota as my companion. But I have no money to buy things.’ And there his fantasy would break down and he would walk away from the shop rather crestfallen, with a heavy heart. Then he had had the good luck to come by some money at the British barracks. The pay which he received there had, of course, to be given to his father, but the bakshish which he had collected from the Tommies amounted to ten rupees, and although he couldn’t buy all the things in the rag-seller’s shop he wished to, he had been able to buy the jacket, the overcoat, the blanket he slept under, and have a few annas left over for the enjoyment of ‘ Red-Lamp ’ cigarettes. His father had been angry at his extravagance, and the boys of the outcastes ’ colony, even Chota and Ram Charan, cut jokes with him on account of his new rigout, calling him ‘ Pilpali sahib ’ (imitation sahib). And he knew, of course, that except for his English clothes there was nothing English in his life. But he kept up his new form, rigidly adhering to his clothes day and night and guarding them from all base taint of Indianness, not even risking the formlessness of an Indian quilt, though he shivered with the cold at night.
A sharp tremor of cold ran through his hot, massive frame. The hair of his body almost stood on end. He turned on his side and waited in the half-dark for something he knew not what. These nights were awful. So cold and uncomfortable ! He liked the days because during the day the sun shone and he could, after he had finished his work, brus
h his clothes with a rag and walk out into the street, the envy of all his friends and the most conspicuous man in the outcastes’ colony. But the nights ! ‘ I must get another blanket,’ he said to himself. ‘ Then father won’t ask me to put a quilt on. He always keeps abusing me. I do all his work for him. He appropriates the pay all right. He is afraid of the sepoys. They call him names. He abuses me. He is happy when they call him Jemadar. So proud of his izzat !1 He just goes about getting salaams from everybody. I don’t take a moment’s rest and yet he abuses me. And if I go to play with the boys he calls me in the middle of the game to come and attend to the latrines. He is old. He doesn’t know anything of the sahibs. And now he will call me to get up, and it is so cold. He will keep lying in bed, and Rakha and Sohini will still be asleep, when I go to the latrines.’ He wrinkled his dark, broad, round face with the feeling of pain that came up into his being and made his otherwise handsome features look knotted and ugly. And thus he lay, awaiting his father’s call, hating to hear it, yet lying anxiously in expectation of—the rude bullying order to get up.
‘ Get up, ohe you Bakhya, you son of a pig,’ came his father’s voice, sure as a bullet to its target, from the midst of a broken, jarring, interrupted snore. ‘ Get up and attend to the latrines or the sepoys will be angry.’
The old man seemed to awake instinctively, for a moment, just about that time every morning and then to relapse into his noisy sleep under the greasy, dense, thick, dis-coloured, patched quilt.
Bakha half opened his eyes and tried to lift his head from the earth as he heard his father’s shout. He was angered at the abuse as he was already feeling rather depressed that morning. The high cheek-bones of his face became pallid with sullenness. His mind went back to the morning after his mother’s death, when although he, Bakha, was awake, his father had thought he was asleep and presuming he was never going to get up, had shouted at him. That was the beginning of his father’s subsequent early-morning calls, which he had begun at first to resist with a casual deafness, and which he now ignored irritatedly. It wasn’t that he couldn’t get up, because ordinarily he woke up from his slumber quite early, his mother having habituated him to getting up early. She used to give him a brass tankard full of a boiling hot mixture of water, tea-leaves and milk from the steaming earthen saucepan that always lay balanced on the two-bricks-with-a-space-in-between oven or fireplace in a corner of their one-roomed house. It was so delightful, the taste of that hot, sugary liquid, that Bakha’s mouth always watered for it on the night before the morning on which he had to drink it. And after he had drunk it he used to put on his clothes and go to work at the latrines, happy and contented. When his mother died and the burden of looking after the family fell on him, there was no time left to look for such comforts and luxuries as an early morning tumblerful of tea. So he learnt to do without it, looking back, however, with fondness to the memory of those days when he lived in the enjoyment not only of the tasty, spicy delights of breakfast, but of all the splendrous details of life, the nice clothes which his mother bought him, the frequent visits to the town and the empty days, filled with play. He often thought of his mother, the small, dark figure, swathed simply in a tunic, a pair of baggy trousers and an apron, crouching as she went about cooking and cleaning the home, a bit too old-fashioned for his then already growing modern tastes, Indian to the core and sometimes uncomfortably so (as she did not like his affecting European clothes), but so loving, so good, and withal generous, giving, always giving, buying him things, kindness personified. He didn’t feel sad, however, to think that she was dead. He just couldn’t summon sorrow to the world he lived in, the world of his English clothes and ‘ Red-Lamp ’ cigarettes, because it seemed she was not of that world, had no connection with it.