/ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT/CULTURE-INDIA: Indo-Anglian Writing Rediscovers the ‘Untouchable’

By Ranjit Devraj Reprint | | Print |

Ranjit Devraj

NEW DELHI, Nov 7 2000 (IPS) - When Mulk Raj Anand, the famous Indian author writing in English, penned his classic ‘Untouchable’, it articulated the hope of deliverance from social oppression, given to India’s low castes by the conquering Englishman.

But that was in the year 1935 and the Raj was at its height.

Anand’s boy protagonist Bakha momentarily escapes the indignities heaped on his untouchable scavenger caste by wearing the trousers of a ‘Tommy’ or English soldier, only to realise that “except for the English clothing there was nothing English in his life”.

Bakha finds that the only people who ever treated him as a human being were the Tommies who frequented his village and thanks to whom he even “learnt to think of himself as superior to his fellow outcasts”.

As the Raj receded into history, so did this brief glimmer of equality. Upper caste ‘brown sahibs’ filled the high positions vacated by the British. Half-a-century after Independence, this group continues to use the language and manner of the former colonial rulers as a tool to keep low castes in their place.

At least, that is the message of author Sagarika Ghose’s novel ‘The Gin Drinkers,’ published by Harper Collins and released early November at the British Council here.

Untouchability, a particularly pernicious form of social discrimination practised for centuries in the country against members of the lowest Hindu castes, is banned by the Constitution of the Indian Republic.

But ‘Gin Drinkers’ appears when the Constitution, which guarantees affirmative action for the former untouchables, is under review by a right-wing government led by the Bharatiya Hindu Party (BJP), which is perceived as serving the interests of the upper castes.

‘The Gin Drinkers’ are a group of contemporary Oxford-educated Indians grappling with the “liquid colonialism” practised and perpetuated by the English-speaking elite through the public schools and the Indian Administrative Service (IAS) – both relics of the Raj.

“As a society we are restless for change. But old privileges are being rethought and new ideas are being laid,” said Ghose at the launch. As a Rhodes scholar to Oxford and daughter of an IAS official herself, Ghose should know.

The immediate provocation for Ghose’s first book was a chance encounter, two years ago, with Dalit-writer and activist Chandra Bhan Prasad who runs the Shikhsha Andolan for Dalits (Educational Movement for Dalits).

In the novel, Prasad is transformed into the character Jai Prakash, but his Shiksha Andolan and its endeavours to take education to the Dalits – a term used to include the socially oppressed in India – denied by their oppressors, is intact.

Like the Tommies in Mulk Raj Anand’s work, it is an Englishman, Sam, who brings home the anomaly of India’s upper castes complaining of race discrimination even as they do the same to their fellow countrymen.

Uma, the Gin Drinker who brings Sam, her boyfriend to India, does her best to keep him away from Jai Prakash and his village of Badayun in the heart of northern Uttar Pradesh state, where caste feelings run deep.

Uma has other ideas for her English boyfriend and at one point “suddenly wished she could stage a drinks party on freshly mowed lawns in which he could skip between circular tables holding a tennis racquet”.

She complains about Jai Prakash: “You’ve been brainwashed by that fraud. Believe me, there are lots of people like him here. Lots. Godmen, fakes of different kinds, all beneficiaries of Poverty Incorporated. I can’t believe you’ve fallen for this.”

Jai Prakash has other supporters for his cause. And almost predictably, the chief of them is no Indian but an American heiress, Christine, who lives with him in Badayun tending to his needs and believing in him.

“They came too late but left too early. This is the Dalit’s criticism of the British empire,” said Chandra Bhan Prasad, the real-life Jai Prakash, at the launch of Ghose’s book.

Prasad had more home truths for Ghose’s gin drinking gathering: “The most radical amongst you will not agree that the notions of democracy, equality and brotherhood came along with the British and the most reactionary amongst us (dalits) can never curse the British for conquering India”.

Ghose is not the first contemporary writer bold enough to tackle the ticklish theme of dalit oppression.

Arundhati Roy’s Booker-prize winning novel, ‘The God of Small Things’, focuses on that most socially explosive of all relationships in India – a love affair between a dalit man and a high-caste woman that ends with the brutal murder of the man by the police.