The characters, to use Anand’s own words, ‘are taken from my intimate experience, but are transformed creatively from within—often a lamb becomes a lion and a dove becomes a jackal. I rely on my subconscious life a good deal in my creative work, and allow my fancy to play havoc with facts’. This crystallizes into what Charlotte Bronte wrote in one of her letters, ‘We only suffer reality to suggest, never to dictate.’ Vicky might have a slight resemblance to a prince of the Simla Hill States whom Anand had taught in the 1920s, but in him Anand has caricatured some aspects of his own emotional life (one must not forget the circumstances which induced him to write the novel). Dr Shankar is modelled on Professor Man Mohan, a liberal gentleman who was a Private Secretary to a Maharaja. But there is as much of Anand in Dr Shankar as in the Prince, for Dr Shankar is the rational side of the author analyzing the irrational side as seen in Vicky. Ganga Dasi has her origin in the hill-woman who initiated Anand’s divorce. Maharani Indira bears some likeness to Anand’s wife, Kathleen Van Gelder. Anand used to tell her, ‘If ever I were dying, I am sure you would come to nurse me.’ In the novel Indira goes to look after her husband when he is admitted to the asylum in Poona. Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel is a facsimile of the man as everyone knew him.
The two principal characters, Vicky and Ganga Dasi, defy facile literary definition; they are presented in such complexity and with such psychological insight that critics will go on redefining them. It is hard to put one’s finger on the spot at any one moment and say, ‘This is it,’ for at the very next moment such conclusions may be belied. The human mind is capable of serious contradictions, and a person can encompass deception, self-deception and honesty at one and the same time. Take Vicky’s confession to June Withers: ‘I have lost my throne. . . . But that would not have mattered. Only, only, the woman I loved also left me.’ Is he play-acting here to win June’s sympathy, or is he genuine about his feeling for his mistress? Is he indulging in one of his melodramatic gestures, or have the actor and the man now become one? There is no one answer to any of these questions. The author’s purpose is to reveal life in all its contradictions, not to explain it.
The relationship between Vicky and Ganga Dasi is as complex as their individual characters themselves. Dr Shankar, for all his lengthy analysis to reach and reveal the well-spring of human actions, never quite succeeds in summing up either of the two as concisely as they sum up each other. Vicky describes Ganga as a ‘bitch’, and a ‘consummate actress’, while she calls him ‘very clever’, ‘very cruel’ and ‘very jealous’. It is only later in the novel that Dr Shankar makes fewer attempts to dissect their relationship, and prefers terms such as ‘sadist’, ‘masochist’ and ‘split personality’ to sum up Ganga Dasi. After all, these terms are objective and safe and, for all their generality, as close to the mark as any clinical psychoanalysis.
Every character in the novel is drawn in sharp outline and with discrimination. The cynical Dr Shankar, whose own case seems as hopeless as that of the Prince, pursues his patient as doggedly as his patient pursues his mistress. There is the loyal but vulgar ADC, Captain Partap Singh, a giant Sikh ‘with nothing in his head except a little white matter under the bun of his long black hair’. We have Munshi Mithan Lal, ex-tutor and now Private Secretary to His Highness, a ready victim of Vicky’s perverse sense of humour, but a master of statecraft; General Raghbir Singh, who has enjoyed His Highness’s mistress and his confidence, and now commands his army; His Highness’s uncle, Raja Parduman Singh, who is at least his nephew’s equal in the hurling of abuse and epithets; Pandit Gobind Das, the provincial politician, not devoid of conscience but totally dead to other people’s intrinsic lives; Bool Chand, the bania who knows which side his bread is buttered; the new prime minister Popatlal Shah, a cheap imitation of his chief, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, but strong enough to unnerve the Prince with his Anglo-Saxon economy of words; Maharani Indira, who lets her actions speak for her; the affable Mr Peter Watkins of the American embassy, whose ruminations in the jungles of Sham Pur hasten Vicky’s downfall; the handsome journalist, Kurt Landauer, who finds Gangi an easier and more exotic sport than panthers; and June Withers, who swoons to wake up in the Prince’s arms and tastes of the life she has read about in the penny dreadfuls. All of them are intricately woven into the design of the novel, as intricately as the people of Sham Pur who hang like a dark cloud on the horizon and whose power is always felt even though their presence might not be noticeable.
Private Life of an Indian Prince has something to offer to every kind of reader. The historian will be fascinated by the intriguing relationship between the Prince and his subjects and the new Government of India; the moralist will find confirmation of his belief in Vicky’s destruction; the romanticist will find consolation in the Prince’s ultimate love for Ganga Dasi and his sacrifice; the realist will point at the futility of knowledge which is not backed by a will to act; the psychologist will either agree with Dr Shankar’s analysis or gleefully take issue with him. But the novel will most please the committed reader who is also an artist. An order has been ruthlessly condemned, but the hereditary architect of the order retains our sympathy to the end.
And all will find the novel eloquent, ironical and funny, tragic and human.
Saros Cowasjee
University of Regina, Regina
Untouchable
Preface
This remarkable novel 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 civilization and the Indian civilization 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 mere 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 wh
o 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 generalizing 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 recognize 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’ occurs in the morning, and poisons all that happens subsequently, even such pleasant episodes as the 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
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 carcasses left to dry on its banks, the dung of donkeys, sheep, horses, cows and buffaloes heaped up to be made into fuel cakes. 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 smell. 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 Jemadar of all the sweepers in the town and the cantonment, and officially in charge of the three rows of public latrines which lined the extreme end of the colony, by the brook-side. But then he had been working in the barracks of a British regiment for some years on 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 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 cave-like, dingy, dank, 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, on the other side.
The nights had been cold, as they always are in the town of Bulandshahr, 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. ‘Ohe, lover of your mother,’ his father had once abusively said to him, ‘take a quilt and throw away that blanket of the goras; you will die of cold.’ But Bakha was a child of modern India. The clear-cut styles of European dress had impressed his naive 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 knew they were white sahibs. 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 instead 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 sola 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 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. 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 bakhshish 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 had 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’. 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, brush 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! 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 irritation 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.
Classic Mulk Raj Anand Page 3