Untouchable by Mulk Raj Anand (1935)

Untouchable by Mulk Raj Anand is a novel that re-creates one day in the life of Bakha, an eighteen-year-old Indian youth of the Untouchable caste. It is set in Bulashah, a fictional town in India, and was written against the backdrop of Mahatma Ghandhi’s 1930 campaigns against British colonial rule.

During this one day in the life of a young Untouchable, we are introduced to Bakha and his family – his widowed father, the Foreman of all the sweepers in the area; his younger brother and his beautiful sister, Sohini. Bakha had worked in the barracks of a British regiment for a few years and had been captivated by the glamour of the ‘white man’s’ life. The pay he earned at the barracks had gone to his father but the bakshish he collected allowed him to buy some English clothes, which he coveted. After his mother died, he became the breadwinner of the family and worked as a sweeper and toilet cleaner. When she was alive, she would make Bakha  a hot, sweet drink early in the morning and he would dress and go to work at the latrines happy and contented. When the burden of looking after the family fell on him, he had to do without that little luxury and home life with his father became very uncongenial.

The Tommies had treated him as a human being and he had learnt to think of himself as superior to his fellow-outcastes…he had soon become possessed with an overwhelming desire to live their life…He had felt that to put on their clother 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 peculiar Indian circumstances.

On this one day, Bakha went out to do his work and over the course of the day was subject to verbal abuse and shame. As he was walking through the marketplace, he accidentally touched a man of a higher caste thus defiling him. As the man yelled abuse other people gathered around Bakha and joined in the attack, keeping their distance to avoid being made unclean. Bakha was a strong, handsome and dignified young man but he cowered beneath the contempt shown by others and displayed a servile humility. His sister was asked by a Brahmin to clean the latrines in the temple and while she was there, he made inappropriate suggestions to her. When she screamed he cried out, ‘Polluted! Polluted!’ Bakha saw her in the temple and rushed in and dragged her out, despite the prohibition against Untouchables entering the temple. When he discovered what had happened he felt he could kill the man.

A superb specimen of humanity he seemed whenever he made the high resolve to say something, to go and do something, his fine form rising like a tiger at bay. And yet there was a futility written on his face. He could not overstep the barriers which the conventions of his superiors had built up to protect their weakness against him. He could not invade the magic circle which protects a priest from attack by anybody, especially by a low-caste man. So in the highest moment of his strength, the slave in him asserted himself, and he lapsed back, wild with torture, biting his lips, ruminating his grievances.

Towards the end of his humiliating day, Bakha came to the Grand Trunk Road where a crowd was gathered in anticipation of Mahatma Ghandhi’s visit. Just released from prison, Ghandhi addressed the crowd:

‘As you all know, while we are asking for freedom from the grip of a foreign nation, we have ourselves, for centuries, trampled underfoot millions of human beings without feeling the slightest remorse for our iniquity. For me the question of these people is moral and religious…I regard untouchability…as the greatest blot on Hinduism.’

The term ‘Dalit’ dates back to the 19th Century but has come into popular use in India only very recently and has been used increasingly to demonstrate the rejection of derogatory names given by outsiders and further, to refer to their pain, suffering and hope for liberation. In Sanskrit, the word Dalit means suppressed, smashed, broken to pieces. Dalits who make up almost 20% (200 million) of the Indian population were considered untouchables as a result of the Hindu understanding of ‘ritual pollution and purity.’ Dalits were not even included in the four castecategories and were considered extremely polluted. They were assigned occupations such as removal of dead animals, scavenging and cleaning of the village. They were also landless agricultural labourers and tanners. They were barred from using village water tanks and public roads. Temple doors were closed on them.

Untouchability was banned by the Indian Constitution in 1950, but despite this, caste atrocities are a daily occurrence with as many as five being committed against Dalits per hour. Despite attempts at social reform, the Brahmanical elite and upper caste Hindus have ensured that this ancient hierarchical structure continues to hold sway in India even today. 

India is well known for its caste system, but not many associate the world’s biggest democracy with what Dr Sonkar (who holds a PhD in Law), and many other Dalits, call an apartheid-style state.

The Jogini tradition – marrying a girl to a village deity – though officially banned in 1988, is still prevalent in impoverished parts of India. The deeply entrenched caste system plays a pivotal role in perpetuating the practice.

Back to the Classics: Train to Pakistan by Khushwant Singh (1956)

The Partition of India in 1947 is something I've been interested in for a long time but it wasn't until I read Train to Pakistan by Khushwant Singh that I had any idea of the scope of the tremendous upheaval, tragedy and heartache it caused. An arbitrary line drawn by an 'Empire on whom the sun was setting,' divided a nation and created the twins countries of India and Pakistan. Former neighbours and friends became deadly enemies, people lost their homes, and an estimated one to two million lost their lives.
The author chose a true-to-life work of fiction to tell his story. Every character in the story was modelled on a real person that passed through Khushwant Singh's own life. He was about 32 years of age at the time of Partition and witnessed firsthand the atrocities committed by Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims, and records them without taking sides or showing favour. He and his family were forced to flee from Lahore in 1947, leaving behind his home, his belongings and his closest friends.

The Story

In 1947 the new state of Pakistan was formerly announced, setting in motion the mass exodus of ten million Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs. Northern India was in chaos and only in the remote villages on the frontier was there any semblance of peace.
Mano Majra was one of these villages, known mostly because it boasted a train station. Not that many trains stopped there. In fact, it was only two slow passenger trains, one from Delhi to Lahore in the mornings and another from Lahore to Delhi in the evenings, that were scheduled to stop and then only for a few minutes. The express trains and the morning mail train rushed through without pausing. Goods trains shed and collected wagons on the sidings, and throughout the night the villagers could hear the whistling and puffing of engines and the clanging of metal couplings. The trains were the villagers' alarm clocks, signalling their mealtimes, their siestas and their prayer times. That is, up until the summer of 1947.

After Partition, the trains became less punctual, disturbing the rhythm of the village. A unit of Sikh soldiers arrived and machine guns were mounted at the railway station. Trains coming from Delhi stopped and changed their drivers and guards before continuing on to Pakistan. Trains from Pakistan heading to Delhi with their Hindu and Sikh refugees would run through without stopping.
But one morning, the train from Pakistan stopped at Mano Majra and the only person to emerge alive out of the fifteen hundred on board was a guard from the tail end of the carriages.

It was a botched up surgical operation. India's arms were chopped off without any anaesthetic, and streams of blood swamped the land of the five rivers known as the Punjab.

An order came to evacuate all the Muslims in Mano Majra to a refugee camp and from there, be placed on a train to Pakistan. Sikh agitators arrived in the village after the Muslims had left and drummed up support for a revenge attack on the next train to Pakistan. For hundreds of years the Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims had lived together as neighbours in this village and now those former neighbours and friends who had just left were to be murdered.

Iqbal, born a Sikh and educated in England, came to Mano Majra with his head full of theory to spread his message of communist reform. Learning that the train to Pakistan was to be sabotaged, he found he had nothing to say to the people of Mano Majra:

Should he go out, face the mob and tell them in clear ringing tones that this was wrong - immoral? Walk right up to them with his eyes fixing the armed crowd in a frame - without flinching, without turning...
Then with dignity fall under a volley of blows, or preferably a volley of rifle shots. A cold thrill went down Iqbal's spine.
There would be no one to see this supreme act of sacrifice...It would be an utter waste of life! And what would it gain? A few subhuman species were going to slaughter some of their own kind - a mild setback to the annual increase of four million...
In a state of chaos self-preservation is the supreme duty.

If you really believe that things are so rotten that your first duty is to destroy- to wipe the slate clean - then you should not turn green at small acts of destruction. Your duty is to connive with those who make the conflagration, not to turn a moral hosepipe on them - to create such a mighty chaos that all that is rotten like selfishness, intolerance, greed, falsehood, sycophancy, is drowned. In blood, if necessary.

It was left to another, a most unlikely character, the local 'budmash' or worthless thug, to put his life on the line for the sake of someone he cared about. 

Final thoughts

This was a brutal, gross, and at times crude novel. It's not the sort of book you'd leave sitting on your coffee table and I don't recommend it unconditionally, but it was a heartfelt, candid and literary account written by an excellent author. I learnt more from this one book of fiction than I would have gleaned from a shelf-full of political or historical titles. It was a powerful and awful account. Although there wasn't a political theme to the book, I couldn't help imbibing the political atmosphere of those days. Mano Majra was a miniature India that mirrored the whole nation. It also mirrored humanity in its portrayal of the fluidity of human reasoning - we can justify anything we decide to do. We are so readily manipulated by the opinions of others and the voices of those who stir and agitate.

The photography in this edition of the book is the work of Margaret Bourke-White who lived and travelled in India during 1946 and 1947. She was sent by Life magazine to cover the emerging nations of India and Pakistan after spending four years in Europe during World War II where she witnessed the Nazi concentration camps. According to one of the articles below, some British soldiers and journalists who had witnessed the Nazi death camps claimed Partition’s brutalities were worse.

The copy I have above is out of print but available secondhand or there is this edition here which doesn't include the images by Margaret Bourke-White. The images are online here.

Further reading:

The Great Divide: The violent legacy of Indian Partition

Khushwant Singh (1915-2014) - Obituary

BBC article - The Hidden Story of Partition and its Legacies




Train to Pakistan is my pick for the Back to the Classics 2016 category for a Classic by a Non-White Author.

Death of a Guru

Death of a Guru by Rabindranath R. Maharaj

Rabindranath (Rabi) grew up in Trinidad and was descended from a long line of Brahmin priests. His father, a great Yogi,  had renounced all attachments to the physical world within days of his marriage and from that time on had responded to no one (including Rabi who wouldn’t have been born if his father’s vows had come any sooner) and remained in a trance-like state for 8 years when he suddenly died in mysterious circumstances.

Rabi’s mother was deeply religious and taught him his duty as a Hindu. He was devoted to her but shortly after his father’s death, they were separated when she took her husband’s ashes to India to be spread on the Ganges and he was left in the care of his Aunt.  His mother was not to return until 11 years later.

At the age of 10, Rabi’s reputation as an uncompromising religious Hindu was growing and he was accepted as a student at the temple where he spent his days in transcendental meditation, yoga and other religious devotions, but his belief in the idea that he was ‘a chosen vessel, destined for early success in the search for union with Brahman’ clashed with the reality of daily life and caused much friction between his Aunt & himself.

‘It seemed difficult to face everyday life after hours in trance. The conflict and contrast between these two worlds was unresolvable. The higher states of consciousness I experienced in meditation were supposedly approaching reality as it really was. Yet the everyday world of joys and sorrows, pain and pleasure, birth and death, fears and frustrations……this was the world I had to deal with, and I dare not dismiss it as illusion unless I was prepared to call insanity true enlightenment. My religion made beautiful theory, but I was having serious difficulty applying it in everyday life.’

The book details his increasing deep inner struggles and conflict, his fear of the gods he worshipped, the caste system  & the unchangeable law of karma and at the age of 15 years, ‘the death of a guru’ with the  revelation that the true God and Shepherd loved him and was speaking to him.

The book continues with the transformation of many members of his family, his difficult reunion with his mother, medical studies in London, work with young people who were being swept into Eastern mysticism through drug use, and eventually his call to expose the Hinduization of western Society.

Although this book was written some years ago, I think it’s still important for today. We’re just on the other side where transcendental meditation, Yoga, ‘doing one’s own thing’ (dharma) and other Eastern concepts are now a part of our culture.

The descriptions of Hindu life and culture alone are very informative but I haven’t read another book that explained Eastern mysticism so well and for students heading into a world that is ‘doing its own thing’ it could be very valuable.

According to the author Yoga literally means 'yoking' and refers to union with Brahman. The positions and breath control are intended as aids to to Eastern meditation and he states that no part of Yoga can be separated from the philosophy behind it.

The book was first published  in the late 1970’s and is still in print but has been updated. 

I like to schedule this at some stage in in upper high school for its philosophical and biographical aspects.