On Thursday morning after yoga, I didn’t work out any chords for the songs I’ve been working on. I got my journal and Twitter postings out of the way so that after song practice I could start working right away on my essay.
I did a shortened song practice of doing only one verse and one chorus of most of my songs and started working on my essay just before 8:00.
I weighed 85.7 kilos before breakfast.
I worked until 11:00 gathering quotes about existence, birth, and childlikeness from Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable, and then I took a siesta until 12:30.
I worked on the essay until 17:45.
I weighed 85 kilos at 17:50.
There were just over six hours to go before my essay needed to be handed in.
I wasn’t fully satisfied with my essay. I had actually been working on a previous version of it for more than a month but then Apala told me I was getting too far away from the novel and I needed to focus on close reading of that. I think I was supposed to engage with a secondary text in relation to the novel but after changing the format of the essay with two days to go I didn’t have time. It would have been much better if I’d started in this direction weeks ago and I could have probably brought in other texts.
I had a bit of a scare at 23:30, as Shankar’s wifi was down but it’s been going off periodically for a few minutes at a time since I bought the new computer, which doesn’t need an adaptor for the internet like the old one does. It came back on in time to submit the paper and I handed it in at 23:43, with 17 minutes before the extended deadline. Here it is:
To Be Useful is to Be Invisible in Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable
There is no man or woman can be touched – Leonard Cohen
Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable demonstrates that the perceivability of people as individuals is inversely proportional to their functionality. To understand that another group exists, they must be seen, heard, and touched outside of their assigned labour role in society. This is also true and perhaps more so in regard to self-perception and can be seen in this Bildungsroman of a day in the life of Bakha the sweeper. The beginning of this day of development is symbolically a birth and I will show how birth followed by aspects of childhood reflect Bakha’s hopes for his existence. Then I will expose the forces that resist the emergence of Untouchables like Bakha as individuals, namely those attached to the benefits they derive from caste division. I will then present the ways in which usefulness works directly at odds with self-development. I will conclude by questioning whether Bakha really does emerge as an adult individual in any substantial way after resolving to return to his assigned function with nothing more than a resolution to refuse bad food and hope for changes from outside.
Bakha is “a child of modern India (Anand 10).” Although eighteen years of age and a young adult, Bakha is a child in the sense that his story is one of approaching existence. But in India, he is considered “illegally begotten”, ironically even by his own father, and therefore he is an illegitimate child (Anand 13) while his father sees members of the upper castes as his own “father and mother (Anand 67).” The phrase “illegally begotten” speaks to the Untouchable’s lack of legitimate existence, but also to the injustice of their enforced subaltern state.
Bakha is symbolically “a child,” born upon waking at the beginning of this one-day Bildungsroman (Anand 10). Throughout the story, there are references to his childlike state of being. He views the world around him with the “open, hopeful, astonished eyes of the child (Anand 64).” He feels a childlike wonder while watching the proficient labourers in the marketplace perform their crafts, such as “the skill of a woodcutter and … the manipulation of a sewing-machine by a tailor.” (Anand 37).” His ingenuous admiration of the work of tradespeople who are considered to be above the sub-caste to which he belongs causes his own people to be equated with being in a state of comparative infancy.
As Bakha cannot read and is not allowed the opportunity to do so because of his low status, this situation keeps him in a perpetual state of childhood. Independently of the education system that excludes him, he plans to learn to read for the empowerment that it would give him (Anand 33). But part of his education is also the realization of the powerlessness that his position affords. His coming into being through education must happen independently of his spiritual subsistence as a sweeper.
The emergence of Bakha’s sense of self is resisted by those whose high-born status makes them justify their belief that they are above him. The higher castes stand between and eclipse the Untouchables’ access to the idealized sky of religion (Anand 59). While requiring him to clean their dirt, they reject and resist his right to “float in the sea of existence (Anand 59)!” He wonders why he has to do what he does while being mistreated for doing it. It is only through such questions of purpose that self perception emerges.
The outcastes only come into being when they are useless. We see this as they rest in the sun and “their insides” are “… concentrated in the act of emergence, of a new birth ... (Anand 30)” The Untouchables cannot be made into more than a faceless hive as long as they remain focused on executing the necessary quotidian tasks that are considered unclean by the upper castes. When Bakha performs his assigned utility, he falls into the background and becomes blended with that function. That he is only noticed when he fails to be useful can be seen when the Havildar calls for him after finding that he has not cleaned the latrines (Anand 14). His failure to perform his duty has made him exist to the Havildar. Then, after the Havildar uses the cleaned latrine, he again no longer needs Bakha and therefore perceives him once again. But what Havildar sees are Bakha’s European clothes, which stand drastically apart from the traditional habit of his function, thereby making him visible (Anand 15). This is also shown in the marketplace when Bakha is not performing his duties and not announcing the name of his profession by calling out “sweeper coming.” This makes him both visible and ironically touchable as he is slapped after touching an upper caste man (Anand 39-42).
That work conceals the self is further illustrated in another conversation with Havildar: “Where do you keep yourself hidden?” he asks, with the answer being, “I have to work … (Anand 86).” Bakha loses himself in his work, without realizing his actions, and ends up “completely oblivious” (Anand 17).
Succumbing to his function impedes even Bakha’s own self-awareness when he is not engaged with work, limiting him to merely superficial contemplation. In his almost Wordsworthian pastoral mo-ment outside of town, Bakha observes “each little stem of plant becoming a big leaf, distinct and im-portant (Anand 78).” But it escapes him that these stems emerging as individuals are a metaphor for his own potential awakening and that of his fellow Untouchables. His emergence is inhibited by his frustrated contemplativeness, and his “unenlightened will.” He is missing “the force and vivacity of thought to transmute his vague sense into the superior instinct ... (Anand 77)” Without having the time to develop an ability to explore his own interior, he has no self and therefore no being. This illusive contemplative existence that could crown Bakha’s life remains out of reach, and like the coveted solar to-pee that hangs teasingly on the wall at the regiment, “there is no way of getting it” (Anand 84).
The Untouchables cannot do anything to elevate their status until they come into existence. Slaves who cannot be seen performing invisible slavery cannot be liberated from enslavement. A sense of needing to exist to one’s own perception can only develop from the understanding that such a self-perception is not there. It is only after being abused in the marketplace that Bakha becomes fully conscious of his own state of non-being. At that moment he is almost swallowed by the reality of his life as an untouchable handler of dung. The self-realization of his own untouchability is more accurately a revelation that he is not Bakha, and cannot fully be Bakha as long as he is an Untouchable. This is emphasized with the ironic imagery of pregnancy. The shock of recognition that he is an Untouchable had “sent a quiver into his being.” It had penetrated him and instantaneously developed to a “quickening” which is the moment halfway through pregnancy when the fetus begins to kick at the walls of the womb. Bakha has become pregnant with his own untouchability while at the same time the Untouchable that he suddenly understands himself to be is pregnant with the unborn and unfulfilled Bakha waiting to come into being (Anand 43).
The end of the novel leaves Bakha still flirting with existence, with more understanding of his social status, some hope for emancipation from outside, and a “queer kind of strength” drawn from Gandhi’s wish that the Untouchables have “the strength to work out” their “soul’s salvation to the end.” He has learned from Gandhi that he must take control over what he eats, by accepting the offering of “good, sound grain (Anand 121).” Bakha likes this advice because he is already disgusted by the eating of the half-finished meals of others (Anand 70), and he understands that this small act of resistance may afford him the passive empowerment of dignity. Gandhi however does not explain how the Untouchables are going to cook the fresh grain they may receive if no one will give them water from the well (Anand 20).
At the end of the day, Bakha emerges from his childlike state to the threshold of a more mature understanding of his downtrodden situation and how to exist in spite of it. He resolves to continue doing the work of a scavenger and puts hope in a vague future when modern developments might liberate him from cleaning latrines (Anand 126-127). However, these three solutions: the “soul’s salvation”, the action of being choosy beggars, and the hope of being liberated in an undetermined future by flush toilets, are very internal and passive. There is nothing in them that would emancipate the Untouchables from being outcasts of the caste system. Bakha takes heart from quietly knowing that his people are objectively equal to the members of the other castes of India, but he shows no determination to stand up to the system and demand equal rights. He seems to be content with some degree of realization but there is no clear indication of what Bakha will do with this newfound sense of being, and what he will use it to become. But it does not read as a self-awareness but rather as a status awareness that may not carry him to any degree of presence.
Work Cited
Anand, Mulk Raj. Untouchable, Hutchinson International Authors Limited, 1947, PDF.
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