“He sniffed at the clean, fresh air around the flat stretch of land and vaguely sensed a difference between the odorous, smoky world of refuse, and the open, radiant world of sun. He wanted to warm his flesh; he wanted the warmth to get behind the scales of the dry, powdery surface that had formed on his fingers; he wanted the blood in the blue veins that stood out on the back of his hand to melt.”
untouchable
You know! In a memoir of his first story “Lost child”, Mulkraj Anand mentioned that he dared to show his story to Virginia Woolf. She asked him to read it out in her next home party. Desmond Macarthy, Victoria Sackill West, Edward Garnet, clapped after he read his story.
During that time, in one of her pamphlets, Virginia Woolf attacked many novelists like Arnold Bennet, H G Wells, John Galsworthy, for writing about the characters of sub- world. This shocked Mulkraj because he was planning to write this novel about the untouchable people. He was further demotivated when one of the young poets, after knowing that Mulkraj was going to write about his growing up years among tough boys, sons of bandsmen, washer men and sweepers, said, leave your Cockneys in their sordid world….As we ignore the Russian writer Gorky’s ‘Lower depths’; write like Laurence Hope about flowers in garden Shalimar!
Then coming back to India, Mulkraj wrote this novel under the guidance of Gandhi. Gandhi advised him not to use big english words and to use the local language.
This is story of a sweeper named Bakha, a young and intelligent character.
Through the ordeals and activities of life of Bakha, his family, his friends and other characters writer has given a wonderful but tyrannical imagery of those days when the untouchability was a great challenge in Indian society. He has depicted very artfully the conflicts between the high caste and lower caste people in the society and has finally reached to the argument that the untouchability was inhumane.
Bakha is a representative of down trodden in the pre-independent era of India. He suffers because of his caste and all the lower castes people are suffering because they are by birth outcaste. Writer has depicted the hypocrisy of the upper caste people that men like Pt. Kali Nath enjoy the touch of the lower caste girls, but do not treat lower caste people equally in other matters. He has exposed all this hypocrisy and double standards. Bakha has been portrayed as a universal figure to show the oppression, injustice, humiliation to the whole community of the outcastes in India in this book.
An attractively written story by Anand, proving a fact that social exclusion and exploitation of the subaltern is well rooted in the caste system of India !
An outcast was not allowed to enter into the house of higher caste, even when food was required in utmost urgency…
“For being an outcast he could not insult the sanctity of the house by climbing on the house on the top floors where the kitchens were, but had to shout and announce his arrival from below.
Untouchable
‘Bread for the sweeper mother bread for the sweeper,’ He called standing in the door of the first house. His voice died down to the echo of ‘thak, thak, thak’, which stole into the alley.
‘The sweeper has come for the bread, mother!” he shouted a little louder.
But it was of no avail.
He penetrated further into the alley and standing near a point where the doors of four houses were near each other, He shouted his call: ‘Bread for the sweeper, mother; bread for the sweeper.’
Yet no one seemed to hear him on the tops of the house.”
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