UNTOUCHABLE

by Unknown

  The Mahatma raised his right arm from the folds of his shawl and blessed the crowd with a gentle benediction. The babble of voices died out, as if he had sent an electric shock through the mass of humanity gathered at his feet. This strange man seemed to have the genius that could, by a single dramatic act, rally multi-coloured, multi-tongued India to himself. Someone stood up to chant a hymn. The Mahatma had closed his eyes and was praying. In the stillness of the moment Bakha forgot all the details of his experience during the day, the touched man, the priest, the woman in the alley, his father, Chota, Ram Charan, the walk in the hills, the missionary and his wife. Except for the turbaned, capped and aproned heads of the men and women sitting on the grass before him, his eyes seemed intent on one thing and one thing alone, Gandhi, and he heard each syllable of the Hindu hymn :

  ‘ The dawn is here, O traveller, arise ;

  Past is the night, and yet sleep seals thine eyes.

  Lost is the soul that sleeps—dost not thou know ?

  The sleepless one finds peace beyond all woe.

  Oh, waken ! Shed thou off thy slumber deep,

  Remember him who made thee and oh, weep.

  For shame, is this the way of love—to sleep

  When he himself doth ceaseless vigil keep ?

  Repent, O soul, from sin and find release,

  Q erring one, in sin there is no peace.

  What boots it now to mourn on bended knees,

  When thou thyself didst thine own load increase ?

  What thou wouldst do to-morrow do to-day,

  Do thou the task that thou must face to-day.

  What shall avail thy sorrow and dismay

  When thieving birds have borne thy grain away ? ’

  Then his attention began to flag. His mind wandered. He thought of the race he had to run to get here. He noticed how still everyone was. It irked him to see everyone so serious. The silence was getting on his nerves. But a part of him seemed to have flown, to have evaporated. He felt he had lost something of himself and was uneasy on account of it, yet thrilled about it, happy. He felt pleased to be sharing the privilege of being in a crowd gathered before the Mahatma. The hymn seemed so heavy. Yet the other feeling was light. The sage seemed so pure. Yet there was something intimate and warm about him. He smiled like a child. Bakha gazed at him. It was the only way in which he could escape feeling self-conscious. By doing that he forgot himself and everything else, as he felt he ought. The brown and black faces below him were full of a stilled rapture. He sought to feel like them, attentively absorbed. Luckily for him, just then, the Mahatma began his speech. It was a faint whisper at first, the Mahatma’s voice, as it came through a loud-speaker :

  ‘ I have emerged,’ he said slowly, as if he were measuring each word and talking more to himself than to anyone else, ‘ from the ordeal of a penance, undertaken for a cause which is as dear to me as life itself. The British Government sought to pursue a policy of divide and rule in giving to our brethren of the depressed classes separate electorates in the Councils that will be created under the new constitution. I do not believe that the bureaucracy is sincere in its efforts to elaborate the new constitution. But it is one of the conditions under which I have been released from gaol that I shall not carry on any propaganda against the government. So I shall not refer to that matter. I shall only speak about the so-called “ Untouchables,” whom the government tried to alienate from Hinduism by giving them a separate legal and political status.

  ‘ 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. When I undertook to fast unto death for their sake, it was in obedience to the call of my conscience.’

  Bakha didn’t understand these words. He was restless. He hoped the Mahatma wouldn’t go on speaking of things he (Bakha) couldn’t understand. He found his wish fulfilled, for a potent word interpreted his thoughts.

  ‘ I regard untouchability,’ the Mahatma was saying, ‘ as the greatest blot on Hinduism. This view of mine dates back to the time when I was a child.’

  That was getting interesting. Bakha pricked up his ears.

  ‘ I was hardly yet twelve when this idea dawned on me. A scavenger named Uka, an Untouchable, used to attend our house for cleaning the latrines. Often I would ask my mother why it was wrong to touch him, and why I was forbidden to do so. If I accidentally touched Uka I was asked to perform ablutions ; and though I naturally obeyed, it was not without smilingly protesting that untouchability was not sanctioned by religion and that it was impossible that it should, be so. I was a very dutiful and obedient child ; but, so far as was consistent with respect for my parents, I often had tussles with them on this matter. I told my mother that she was entirely wrong in considering physical contact with Uka as sinful ;. it could not be sinful.

  ‘ While on my way to school, I used to touch the Untouchables ; and, as I never would conceal the fact from my parents, my mother would tell me that the shortest cut to purification after the unholy touch, was to cancel it by touching a Mussulman passing by. Therefore, simply out of reverence and regard for my mother, I often did so, but never did it believing it to be a religious obligation.’

  As each part of the story which the Mahatma related about the beginning of his interest in untouchability fell on his ear, Bakha felt as if he were Uka, the scavenger. By feeling like that, he thought, he would be nearer the sage, who seemed a real and genuine sympathiser. ‘ But the speech, the speech,’ he became aware that he was missing the words of the Mahatma’s speech. He eagerly returned to attention and caught the narrative at :

  ‘ The fact that we address God as “ the purifier of the polluted souls ” makes it a sin to regard anyone 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 do not say that this thing crystallised in me at the age of twelve, but I do say that I did then regard untouchability as a sin.

  ‘ I was at Nellore on the National Day. I met the Untouchables there, and I prayed as I have done to-day. I do want to attain spiritual deliverance. I do not want to be reborn. But if I have to be reborn, I should wish to be reborn as an Untouchable, so that I may share their sorrows, sufferings and the affronts levelled at them, in order that I may endeavour to free myself and them from their miserable condition. Therefore I prayed that, if I should be born again, I should be so, not as a Brahmin, Kshatriya, Vaishya, Shudra, but as an outcaste, as an Untouchable.

  ‘ I love scavenging. In my ashram an eighteen-year-old Brahmin lad is doing a scavenger’s work, in order to teach the ashram scavenger cleanliness. The lad is no reformer. He was born and bred in orthodoxy. He is a regular reader of the Gita, and faithfully says his prayers. When he conducts the prayers, his soft melodies melt one in love. But he felt that his accomplishments were incomplete until he had also become a perfect sweeper. He felt that if he wanted the ashram sweeper to do his work well he must do it himself and set an example.’

  Bakha felt thrilled to the very marrow of his bones. That the Mahatma should want to be born as an outcaste ! That he should love scavenging ! He loved the man. He felt he could put his life in his hands and ask him to do what he liked with it. For him he would do anything. He would like to go and be a scavenger at his ashram. ‘ Then I could talk to him,’ he said to himself. ‘ But I am not listening, I am not listening ; I must listen.’

  ‘ If there are any Untouchables here,’ he heard the Mahatma say, ‘ they should realise that they are cleaning Hindu society.’ (He felt like shouting to say that he, an Untouchable, was there, but he did not know what the Mahatma meant by ‘ cleaning Hindu society.’) He gave ear to the words with beating heart and heard : ‘ They have, therefore, to purify their lives. They should cultivate the habits of cleanliness, so that no one shall point his finger at them. Some of them are addicted to habits
of drinking and gambling of which they must get rid.

  ‘ They claim to be Hindus. They read the scriptures. If, therefore, the Hindus oppress them, they should understand that the fault does not lie in the Hindu religion, but in those who profess it. In order to emancipate themselves they have to purify themselves. They have to rid themselves of evil habits, like drinking liquor and eating carrion.’

  But now, now the Mahatma is blaming us, Bakha felt. ’That is not fair ! ’ He wanted to forget the last passages that he had heard. He turned to the Mahatma.

  ‘ They should now cease to accept leavings from the plates of high-caste Hindus, however clean they may be represented to be. They should receive grain only—good, sound grain, not rotten grain—and that too, only if it is courteously offered. If they are able to do all that I have asked them to do, they will secure their emancipation.’

  That was more to Bakha’s liking. He felt that he wanted to turn round and say to the Mahatma : ‘ Now, Mahatma ji, now you are talking.’ He felt he would like to tell him that that very day, in that very town where he was speaking, he (Bakha) had had to pick up a loaf of bread from near the gutter ; that to-day, there, in that very city, his brother had had to accept leavings of food from the plates of the sepoys, and that they had all to eat it. Bakha saw himself pitied by the Mahatma in his mind’s eye and consoled by him. It was such a balm, it was so comforting, the great man’s sympathy. ‘ If only he could go and tell my father not to be hard on me ! If only he could go and tell him how I have suffered, if only he could go and tell my father he sympathises with me in my sufferings, my father would at once take me back and be kind to me ever afterwards.’

  ‘ I am an orthodox Hindu and I know that the Hindus are not sinful by nature,’ Bakha heard the Mahatma declaim.. ‘ They are sunk in ignorance. All public wells, temples, roads, schools, sanatoriums, must be declared open to the Untouchables. And, if you all profess to love me, give me a direct proof of your love by carrying on propaganda against the observance of untouchability. Do this, but let there be no compulsion or brute force in securing this end. Peaceful persuasion is the only means. Two of the strongest desires that keep me in the flesh are the emancipation of the Untouchables and the protection of the cow. When these two desires are fulfilled there is swaraj, and therein lies my soul’s deliverance. May God give you strength to work out your soul’s salvation to the end.’

  When the crowd scattered irreverently at the end of the Mahatma’s speech, Bakha stood on the branch of the tree spellbound. Each word of the concluding passage seemed to him to echo as deep and intense a feeling of horror and indignation as his own at the distinction which the caste Hindus made between themselves and the Untouchables. The Mahatma seemed to have touched the most intimate corner of his soul. ‘ Surely he is a good man,’ Bakha said.

  Muffled cries of ‘ Mahatma ji ki-jai,’ ‘ Hindu—Mussulman ki-jai,’ ‘ Harijan ki-jai ’ arose from the middle of the throng again, and Bakha knew that the sage was going from the platform to the gate. He clung to his position on the tree, and was rewarded for his patience by the sight of the Mahatma passing beneath him.

  A man seated on a high wooden board, with a bucket beside him, was distributing water in a silver tankard to Muhammadans in red fezes and Hindus in white Gandhi caps.

  ‘ He has made Hindu and Mussulman one,’ remarked a citizen, surcharged with the glow of brotherliness and humanitarianism which the Mahatma had left in his trail.

  ‘ Let’s discard foreign cloth. Let’s burn it !’ the Congress volunteers were shouting. And true enough, Bakha saw people throwing their felt caps, their silk shirts and aprons into the pile, which soon became a blazing bonfire.

  ‘ Sister,’ said another citizen to a grass-cutter’s wife, who struggled in her heavy accordion-pleated skirt to take her two children home, ‘ let me help you through the crowd. Give me the big boy to hold.’

  There was only one queer voice which dissented from all this.

  ‘ Gandhi is a humbug,’ it was saying. ‘ He is a fool. He is a hypocrite. In one breath he says he wants to abolish untouchability, in the other he asserts that he is an orthodox Hindu. He is running counter to the spirit of our age, which is democracy. He is in the fourth century B.C. with his swadeshi and his spinning-wheel. We live in the twentieth. I have read Rousseau, Hobbes, Bentham and John Stuart Mill and I… ’

  Bakha came down the tree like a black bear, and arrested the democrat’s attention by the ridiculous sight he presented. He was going to slink away shyly, but the man, a fair-complexioned Muhammadan dressed in the most smartly-cut English suit he had ever seen, interrupted him :

  ‘ Eh, eh, black man, come here. Go and get a bottle of soda-water for the sahib.’

  Bakha came back with a start and stood staring at the dignitary who had called him. The man wore a monocle in his left eye and Bakha, who had never seen anything of that kind, wondered how a single glass could remain fixed on the eye without a frame.

  ‘ Don’t stare at me !’ shouted the gentleman, while Bakha was wondering who the man could be, too sallow-faced for an Englishman, too white for an Indian, and clad in such fine clothes, yellow gloves on his hands and white cloth on his buckskin shoes.

  ‘ Ham desi sahib (I, native sahib), don’t stare at me,’ said the man deliberately using the wrong Hindustani spoken by the English, but becoming kinder for a moment. ‘ I have just come from Vilayat (England). Is there a soda-water shop near here ? ’

  Bakha had been taken unawares. He couldn’t adjust himself to this phenomenon. So he moved his head to indicate that he didn’t know. Fortunately for him the man’s attention was switched off to his friend, a young man with a delicate feline face, illuminated by sparkling dark eyes and long black curly hair, who stood next to him dressed in flowing Indian robes like a poet’s. Bakha’s inadequate answer did not, therefore, evoke the insolent flourish of the democrat’s cane as it might have done.

  ‘ It is very unfair of you to abuse the Mahatma,’ Bakha heard the young poet say gently, as he walked a little way away from the two men who were now surrounded by a group of people. ‘ He is by far the greatest liberating force of our age. He has his limits, of course. But… ’

  ‘ Precisely,’ Bakha heard his companion interrupt. ‘ That is exactly what I say. And my contention is… ’

  ‘ Yes, but listen, I haven’t finished,’ the poet was saying. ‘ He has his limitations but he is fundamentally sound. He may be wrong in wanting to shut India off from the rest of the world by preaching the revival of the spinning-wheel, because, as things are, that can’t be done. But even in that regard he is right. For it is not India’s fault that it is poor ; it is the world’s fault that the world is rich !… ’

  ‘ You are talking in paradoxes. You have been reading Shaw,’ interrupted the monocled gentleman.

  ‘ Oh, forget Shaw ! I am not a decadent Indian like you to be pandering to those European film stars !’ exclaimed the poet. ‘ But you know that it is only in terms of economic theory that India is behind the other countries of the world. In fact, it is one of the richest countries ; it has abundant natural resources. Only it has chosen to remain agricultural and has suffered for not accepting the machine. We must, of course, remedy that. I hate the machine. I loathe it. But I shall go against Gandhi there and accept it. And I am sure in time all will learn to love it. And we shall beat our enslavers at their own game….’

  ‘ They will put you into prison,’ someone interrupted from the crowd.

  ‘ Never mind that. I am not afraid of prison. I have already been a guest at His Majesty’s boarding-house with a hundred thousand others who were imprisoned last year… ’

  ‘ The peasant who believes this world to be maya (illusion) will not work the machine,’ remarked the supercilious man in spats, as he adjusted his monocle to reflect the cynical glint in his eye.

  ‘ It is India’s genius to accept all things,’ said the poet fiercely. ‘ We have, throughout our long history, been realis
ts believing in the stuff of this world, in the here and the now, in the flesh and the blood. Man is born, and reborn, according to the Upanishads, in this world, and even when he becomes an immortal saint there is no release for him, because he forms the stuff of the cosmos and is born again. We don’t believe in the other world, as these Europeans would have you believe we do. There has been only one man in India who believed this world to be illusory—Shankaracharya. But he was a consumptive and that made him neurotic. Early European scholars could not get hold of the original texts of the Upanishads. So they kept on interpreting Indian thought from the commentaries of Shankaracharya. The word maya does not mean illusion, it means magic. That is the dictum of the latest Hindu translator of the Vedanta, Dr. Coomaraswamy. And in that signification the word approximates to the views on the nature of the physical world of your pet scientists, Eddington and Jeans. The Victorians misinterpreted us. It was as if, in order to give a philosophical background to their exploitation of India, they ingeniously concocted a nice little fairy story : “ You don’t believe in this world ; to you all this is maya. Let us look after your country for you and you can dedicate yourself to achieving Nirvana (release from the trammels of existence).” But that is all over now. Right in the tradition of those who accepted the world and produced the baroque exuberance of Indian architecture and sculpture, with its profound sense of form, its solidity and its mass, we will accept and work the machine. But we will do so consciously. We can see through the idiocy of these Europeans who deified money. They were barbarians and lost their heads in the worship of gold. We can steer clear of the pitfalls, because we have the advantage of a race-consciousness six thousand years old, a race-consciousness which accepted all the visible and invisible values. We know life. We know its secret flow. We have danced to its rhythms. We have loved it, not sentimentally through personal feelings, but pervasively, stretching ourselves from our hearts outwards so far, oh, so far, that life seemed to have no limits, that miracles seemed possible. We can feel new feelings. We can learn to be aware with a new awareness. We can envisage the possibility of creating new races from the latent heat in our dark brown bodies. Life is still an adventure for us. We are still eager to learn. We cannot go wrong. Our enslavers muddle through things. We can see things clearly. We will go the whole hog with regard to machines while they nervously fumble their way with the steam-engine. And we will keep our heads through it all. We will not become slaves to gold. We can be trusted to see life steadily and see it whole.’