One of the prime concerns of a great author is to highlight the cause of the dumb and the deserted, the lowly and the lost of an adverse society. The author also flings a harsh irony on the snobbery and hypocrisy, ostentation and fabrication of the aristocratic people who, sometimes stoop low to achieve the end. A writer, the prince of the pen, is the true voice of the million mass particularly of the untouchable and the vulnerable victimized by undeserved tyranny and injustice from the time immemorial. And this is what prompted Mulk Raj Anand to present the deplorable description of the destitutes. Anand‘s novel Untouchable expresses his great advocacy of the marginalized and defenseless against their age long humiliation, persecution and oppression. Anand himself observes :
“All these heroes as the other men and the women who had emerged in my novels… were dear to me because they were the reflections of the real people I had known during my childhood and youth. And I was only repaying the debt of gratitude I owed them for much of the inspiration –they had given me to mature into manhood, when I began to interpret their lives in my writings. They were not phantoms. They were the flesh of my flesh and blood of my blood and obsessed me in the way, in which certain human beings obsess an artist‟s soul. And I was doing no more than what a writer does when he sees to interpret the truth from the realities of his life.”
Untouchable, the author‘s tour de force, peeps into the life of an untouchable, Bakha, the protagonist who, represents the misery and inhuman treatment of the crushed and the have-nots before Independence. It also shows how an outcast has to lead a life meaner than the animals; how inspite of his virtue, he has to tolerate insult and abuse, ―fret and fever‖ some times on cause and sometimes without cause; how he feels like a caged bird that flutters its wings for a free flight. The novelist narrates a single day‘s events in the life of Bakha, an eighteen years old boy. He is the son of Lakha, the sweeper. Through this two prominent characters, the author hammers hard on the caste-conflict; a conflict which constitutes the core of Hindu religion and procures an obstacle in the path of peace and prosperity. Though this dangerous disease of caste-conflict was on its summit before Independence, it is still seen much or less in almost every state of India. The untouchables, the socially isolated people who form the most vital part of a nation have to lead a deplorable and miserable life beyond description. E. M. Forster rightly holds the view:
“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 can‟t escape and where he is excluded from social intercourse and the consolation of his religion. Unclean himself he pollutes other when he touches them…..”
As the novels opens, we see Bakha receiving so many derogatory epithets by Lakha, e.g. „son of a pig‟ (P.15), „you illegally begotten‟ (P.1), „scoundrel of a sweeper son‟ etc. We also get the detail description of the uncongenial surrounding where Bakha has to live:
“The absence of a drainage system had, through the rains of various season, made of the quarter a marsh which gave out the most offensive smell.” (P.11).
He goes to clean the latrine of Habilder Charat Singh, the famous Hockey player of the 38th Dogras regiment. He works quickly but earnestly and as such Mr. Singh promised to give him a hockey stick and Bakha was overcomed by the man‘s Kindness. Through this episode of hockey stick the author wants to point out the inner urge of the untouchable which seems to be covered with the “dead leaves” or “the sapeless foliage” (P.B.Shelley‘s phrase in Ode to the West Wind). The kindness of Mr. Charat Singh unfurls the layers of dead leaves and thus “the winged seeds” which are suppressed for the ages, begin to sprout and bloom.
In the Well Incident, Anand tries to show the water problem among the untouchables. The feeling of untouchability was so powerfully engraved in the mind of the upper castes that they never permitted the untouchables to fetch water from the public well. They were not allowed to touch even the brook or pond as they would contaminate stream. They had no well of their own because it cost a lot of money. They had to wait hours beside the well had to request the upper caste to pour water in the pitchers. This piteous plight of the untouchables reminds us of the Booker Prize author, Arundhuti Roy, who presents a similar attitude in her debut novel, The God of Small Things. Velutha, like Bakha, in this novel, is not allowed to enter the house of the upper castes. They weren‘t allowed to touch anything that Touchables touched. It is interesting to note that Roy‘s portrayal of Velutha is somewhat different form that of Bakha. The emotions full of rage and anger don‘t find any place in the character of Velutha. He never tries to hammerthe age old norms of society and tradition.
Once Bakha inadvertently touched a caste Hindu in the market. The caste men became so furious that they began to chide him by dint of abusive language e.g. „swine dog‟, you brute‟, „dirty dog‟, etc. Bakha continued to listen to their insults and humiliation but he never opened his mouth. He bent down his forehead and mumbled something. But all his requests fell flat on them. The other man sitting there also began to hiss like a snake. Bakha was surrounded by the crowd of the people. He was so confused that he was dumb-founded. He felt he should run, just to shoot across the throng away from this unbearable torment. But inspite of his earnest apologies, crowd was sadistic in watching him covered with abuses and curses. Fortunately, a Muslim tonga-wallah rescued him from this critical juncture. What an irony! A Hindu humiliating a Hindu but a Muslim consoling him. This episode created a furrow in the gentle mind of the untouchable, Bakha, whose smoldering rage broke like a volcano eruptions:
“Why are we always abused? The santry inspector that day abused my father. They always abuse us. Because we are sweepers. Because we touch dung. They hate dung. I hate it too. That‟s why, I came here. I was tired of working on the latrines everyday. That‟s why they don‟t touch us, the high caste.” (P.58)
It is to be noted that untouchability is one of the greatest evils of our country. The untouchables have been bearing brunt of social persecution from the time immemorial. In the “Manusmriti”, the law book of Hindu social code and domestic life, we see the pathetic plight of the untouchable, who are deprived of gaining knowledge particularly the Vedic knowledge. An untouchable, this book says, has no right to go to the temples; no liberty to listen to the incantations of the Vedas or the other great scriptures. They are also deprived of the right of reading and studying the language, Sanskrit which is supposed to be the richest language of the world. And this resulted in the deterioration of this language which has come to almost a standstill these days. So one of the causes of the degeneration of the Sanskrit language is untouchability and perhaps this is why Mahama Gandhi and Dr. Ambedkar, R.N. Tagore and Swami Vivekananda, Maharshi Dayanand – all have given a scathing attack on the casteist mentality of India. Mahatma Gandhi even went to the extent of saying the untouchable “the Horizon”; that is, the man of God. Truly speaking, the caste division mentioned in the Vedas (Purush Sukta: Sukta 90:12) and in the Srimad Bagavad Gita (IV, 13) was not to create breaches among various castes but to run the society easily and smoothly.
The fault of casteism arose through misinterpretation of our scriptures. The Temple Incident of Untouchable flings a harsh and rugged satire on the hypocrisy and ostentations of the upper caste people like Pandit Kali Nath who, though hates the untouchables, yet invites Mohini, the sister of Bakha, to the temple in order to quench his carnal thirst. He makes improper suggestion to her. On her denial he begins to shout – „polluted, polluted, polluted‟. Anand strongly believes in the uplifttment of the downtrodden specially the untouchable. His primary concern as a novelist is to present a humanitarian compassion for the Dalit and the deserted. He himself admits:
“I hope for a world in which the obvious primary degradation of poverty has been completely removed. So that man can have enough food, clothing and shelter to grow up as strong and healthy human beings, physically and mentally and pro-create a fine race to people the universe……. I want this for all men and women, irrespective of race, colour or creed with special provisions for planned health and housing facilities for the backward and extraspecial provisions for the care of the very old and the very young.” And this is what the novelist has sought to express in Untouchable. To crown the effect, he has introduced even Mahatma Gandhi as a character in the novel who delivers a lecture against untouchability, superstitions and other evils fomenting the nation from the time immemorial. Bakha feels delighted when Gandhi gives the appellation of „Horizon‟, sons of God to the ‗bhangis‟ and „chamars‟. Bakha is richly influenced by his words:
“The fact that we address God as „purifier of the polluted souls makes it a sin to regard any one born in Hinduism as polluted – it is satanic to do so. I have never been tired of repeating that it is a great sin. I don‟t say that this thing crystallized in me at the age of 12, but I do say that I did then regard untouchability as a sin.” (p.164)
Thus, the speech of Gandhi littered with humanistic compassion and motherly affection acts like the balm on the wounds of the protagonist, who longs for asserting his identity in a caste-dominated societal framework. It is his powerful advocacy that consoles Bakha‘s long suppressed heart fractured by remorse and despairs. Consequently the ray of hope and patience descends in his life.
This brief survey aptly shows that Anand‘s primary business as a writer of fiction is to attack the social snobbery and prejudice, superstitions and untouchability. He seems to urge for an attitude full of love and sympathy for the millions mass living under the poverty line and leading a life worse than an animal. This way his attitude is tantamount to G.B. Shaw and Tolstoy, Balzac and Zola, Sarat Chandra and Prem Chand. In the history of Indo-Anglian fictions the credit at first goes to Mulk Raj Anand who identifies himself with the weak and the vulnerable, the hated and the insulted.
From the foregoing discussions, it is clear that Mulk Raj Anand is a novelist with some notions; a novelist who seems to have taken a hammer in his hand to blow hard on the dead customs and misleading traditions, a novelist whopleads for those unnoticed pearls and diamonds which “the dark unfathomed caves of ocean bear.”