UNTOUCHABLE
Page 17
The harangue was impressive, with such fire was it delivered. Not only was the crowd moved but the anglicised Indian was silenced. Bakha was too much under the spell of Gandhi to listen intently to anyone else, and he did not follow all that the poet said although he strained to catch his words.
‘ Who is he ? ’ someone in the crowd queried.
‘ Iqbal Nath Sarshar, the young poet who edits the Nawan Jug (New Era), and his companion is Mr. R. N. Bashir, B.A. (Oxon.), Barrister-at-Law,’ someone volunteered the information.
There were whispers of consent and appreciation, but Mr. Bashir’s voice rose above the others in a derisive little chuckle.
‘ Ha, ha, ho ho ! but what has all this got to do with untouchability ? Gandhi’s plea is an expression of his inferiority complex. I think… ’
‘ I know what you think,’ put in the poet fiercely, exciting some amusement with his brisk retort. ‘ Let me tell you that with regard to untouchability the Mahatma is more sound than he is in his political and economic views. You have swallowed all those cheap phrases about inferiority complex and superiority complex at Oxford without understanding what they mean. You slavishly copy the English in everything….’
‘ That’s right !’ shouted a Congress volunteer. ‘ Look at his silk neck-tie and the suit of foreign cloth that he is wearing ! Shame !’
‘ The heredity and the environment of different people varies,’ continued the poet with a flourish of his hand to still the rude Congress wallah. ‘ Some of us are born with big heads, some with small, some with more potential physical strength, some with less. There is one saint to a hundred million people perhaps, one great man to a whole lot of mediocrities. But essentially, that is to say humanly, all men are equal. “ Take a ploughman from the plough, wash off his dirt, and he is fit to rule a kingdom ” is an old Indian proverb. The civility, the understanding and the gravity of the poorest of our peasants is a proof of that. Go and talk to a yokel and see how kind he is, how full of compliment, and how elegantly he speaks. And the equality of man is no new notion for him. If it had not been for the wily Brahmins, the priestcraft, who came in the pride of their white skin, lifted the pure philosophical idea of Karma, that deeds and acts are dynamic, that all is in a flux, everything changes, from the Dravidians, and misinterpreted it vulgarly to mean that birth and rebirth in this universe is governed by good or bad deeds in the past life, India would have offered the best instance of a democracy. As it is, caste is an intellectual aristocracy, based on the conceit of the pundits, being otherwise wholly democratic. The high-caste High Court Judge eats freely with the coolie of his caste. So we can destroy our inequalities easily. The old mechanical formulas of our lives must go, the old stereotyped forms must give place to a new dynamism. We Indians live so deeply in our contacts ; we are so acutely aware of our blood-stream… ’
‘ I can’t understand what you mean,’ interrupted Bashir irritatedly.
‘ Well, we must destroy caste, we must destroy the inequalities of birth and unalterable vocations. We must recognise an equality of rights, privileges and opportunities for everyone. The Mahatma didn’t say so, but the legal and sociological basis of caste having been broken down by the British-Indian penal code, which recognises the rights of every man before a court, caste is now mainly governed by profession. When the sweepers change their profession, they will no longer remain Untouchables. And they can do that soon, for the first thing we will do when we accept the machine, will be to introduce the machine which clears dung without anyone having to handle it—the flush system. Then the sweepers can be free from the stigma of untouchability and assume the dignity of status that is their right as useful members of a casteless and classless society.’
‘ In fact,’ mocked Bashir, ‘ greater efficiency, better salesmanship, more mass-production, standardisation, dictatorship of the sweepers, Marxian materialism and all that !’
‘ Yes, yes, all that, but no catch-words and cheap phrases. The change will be organic and not mechanical.’
‘ All right, all right, come, don’t let us stand here, I feel suffocated,’ said Mr. Bashir, pulling out a silken handkerchief to wipe his face.
The crowd looked, ogled, stared with wonder at the celebrities and followed them at a little distance, till they disappeared in the unending throng of people going out of the golbagh.
Bakha had stood aside, beyond polluting distance, thinking vaguely of the few things he had understood from the poet’s outburst. He felt that the poet would have been answering the most intimate questions in his (Bakha’s) soul, if he had not used such big words. ’That machine,’ he thought, ’which can remove dung without anyone having to handle it, I wonder what it is like ? If only that " gentreman" hadn’t dragged the poet away, I could have asked him.’
The fires of sunset were blazing on the western horizon. As Bakha looked at the magnificent orb of terrible brightness glowing on the margin of the sky, he felt a burning sensation within him. His face, which had paled and contracted with thoughts a moment ago, reddened in a curious conflict of despair. He didn’t know what to do, where to go. He seemed to have been smothered by the misery, the anguish of the morning’s memories. He stood for a while where he had landed from the tree, his head bent, as if he were tired and broken. Then the last words of the Mahatma’s speech seemed to resound in his ears : ‘ May God give you the strength to work out your soul’s salvation to the end.’ ‘ What did that mean ? ’ Bakha asked himself. The Mahatma’s face appeared before him enigmatic, ubiquitous. There was no answer to be found in it. Yet there was a queer kind of strength to be derived from it. Bakha recollected the words of his speech. It all seemed to stand out in his mind, every bit of it. Specially did the story of Uka come back. The Mahatma had talked of a Brahmin who did the scavenging in his ashram. ‘ Did he mean, then, that I should go on scavenging ? ’ Bakha asked himself. ‘ Yes,’ came the forceful answer. ‘ Yes,’ said Bakha, ‘ I shall go on doing what Gandhi says.’ ‘ But shall I never be able to leave the latrines ? ’ came the disturbing thought. ‘ But I can. Did not that poet say there is a machine which can do my work ? ’ The prospect of never being able to wear the clothes that the sahibs wore, of never being able to become a sahib, was horrible. ‘ But it doesn’t matter,’ he said to console himself, and pictured in his mind the English policeman, whom he had seen before the meeting, standing there, ignored by everybody.
He began to move. His virtues lay in his close-knit sinews and in his long-breathed sense. He was thinking of everything he had heard though he could not understand it all. He was calm as he walked along, though the conflict in his soul was not over, though he was torn between his enthusiasm for Gandhi and the difficulties in his own awkward, naïve self.
The sun descended. The pale, the purple, the mauve of the horizon blended into darkest blue. A handful of stars throbbed in the heart of the sky.
He emerged from the green of the garden into the slight haze of dust that rose from the roads and the paths.
As the brief Indian twilight came and went, a sudden impulse shot through the transformations of space and time, and gathered all the elements that were dispersed in the stream of his soul into a tentative decision : ‘ I shall go and tell father all that Gandhi said about us, ’ he whispered to himself, ‘ and all that that poet said. Perhaps I can find the poet some day and ask him about his machine. ’ And he proceeded homewards.
SIMLA—S.S. Viceroy of India—BLOOMSBURY
September–October 1933
1 Head or Foreman.
1 Prestige.
1 The Brahmins, the Kshatriyas, the two upper castes in Hindu society, justify their superiority by asserting that they have earned their position by the good deeds of multiple lives.
1 An epic poem of the Punjab.
1 Names of various incarnations of the supreme god.
2 The monkey god who helped Rama, the hero of the Ramayana, to fight against his enemy Ravana.
3 The supreme god in its female
form as the divine mother.
1 An invocation to the gods.
1 An invocation to the gods.
2 Idem.
1 An invocation of the ascetics.
2 Idem.
1 The Hindus do not allow a person to die in bed, but bring the dying to rest as near the earth as possible ; the idea being that from the earth we come, to earth we return.
Table of Contents
Cover
About the Author
Title Page
Dedication
Copyright Page
PREFACE
UNTOUCHABLE
Footnotes
UNTOUCHABLE
Page 9
Page 12
Page 16
Page 38
Page 57
Page 58
Page 60
Page 71
Page 81