Dalit migrant, 1947
Book Details
Rosemary Marangoly George
INDIAN ENGLISH AND THE FICTION OF NATIONAL LITERATURE
285pp. Cambridge University Press. £60.
978 1 1070 4000 7
Language and identity vie for the right to India's national literature
NAVTEJ SARNA
The English language has always had an uneasy and complex relationship with the Indian state, being simultaneously the language of the colonizer as well as a bridge to the wider world. It is difficult to deny the advantages Indians have gained from knowing the language. In the early twentieth century, literacy in English served as a hallmark of upward mobility even as the struggle against British rule gathered strength. Given this contradiction, a certain amount of self-consciousness about English was natural. Gandhi began his first public political speech after his return from South Africa in 1914 with an apology for speaking in English; he yearned for a day when people would speak a language that would reach the "heart of a nation". During the freedom struggle, English, though spoken by a minority, effectively became the language of the elite, the language of power and that of the struggle itself. During the drafting of the Indian Constitution, the article on a national language was the most hotly debated; Hindi was finally selected to be the "official" (and not national) language of India with English to continue, for a further fifteen years at least, for those official purposes for which it had been used so far. The final version of the Constitution was first produced in English; yet English, despite its wide usage, does not appear in the twenty-two officially recognized languages listed in the eighth schedule of the Constitution.
Against this background, Rosemary Marangoly George examines intricate issues of language, literature, criticism and nationhood in her ambitiously argued Indian English and the Fiction of National Literature. George's point is that what came to be known as representative or "national" Indian literature was not an organic creation but a deliberately constructed edifice in the years leading up to independence and beyond, and that English played a major role in this exercise. She critically examines the work of Mulk Raj Anand and R. K. Narayan (who along with Raja Rao were the Indian writers best known abroad before Independence, mainly because they wrote in English). Narayan's vision of the caste-ordered but benevolent world of Malgudi that idealized a simple past based on "Indianness" and Anand's progressive, socialist championing of the downtrodden in a colonial setting were ready grist for a literary establishment, including the State-sponsored Sahitya Akademi (Academy of Letters) working to create a singular united national literature out of diverse linguistic and literary traditions. The result was a vision of an India with a past as well as a future, a nation deserving of and ready for freedom – and, once free, capable of claiming its place in world literature. In this endeavour, it was "Indianness", the commonality of spirit and a collective cultural inheritance that was to be celebrated; divisive themes and more immediate literary concerns were underplayed. Ironically, the language that could best take this message of the nation – without sounding parochial or regional – to international audiences, either in original or translation, was English.
This effort to build a national literature meant that much else of perhaps greater merit remained in the shadows, limited to vernacular audiences, simply because it did not fit into a uniting national vision or was not translated into English. This is the inheritance bequeathed to the postcolonial literary establishment in India: it is writing in English that occupies centre stage at the glitzy literary festivals, receives the huge advances, the generous reviews and awards, the sales; the rich literatures of Indian languages still finish a poor second, waiting for the translator's magic wand. What has faded is the preoccupation with portraying a united nation. Writers explore a greater breadth of themes now, including divisive ones; an uncharitable view would be that such themes make books easier to sell abroad as Indian exotica.
George examines Mulk Raj Anand's novel Untouchable, first published in 1935 and recently reprinted with a fluent introduction by Ramachandra Guha, to show how a national reading has subsumed an essentially social reading. Much like Raja Rao's Kanthapura and R. K. Narayan's Waiting for the Mahatma, Untouchable has been read predominantly as a "Mahatma" novel, essentially because of a cameo appearance by Mahatma Gandhi in the novel, Anand's uncorroborated claim – made as late as the mid-1960s – of Gandhi's direct influence on the draft during the author's stay at Sabarmati ashram, and Anand's assertion that his earlier novels were banned by the British. George argues that, contrary to this retrospective view, Untouchable concentrates on the social imperative of abolishing caste hierarchy rather than on anti-colonialism. In fact, it questions the Gandhian approach to untouchability.
A close reading of the novel would appear to bear this out in significant part. Confined Joyce-like to a single day, but written with a clunky realism, Untouchable follows Bakha, a young sweeper boy in the mould of a noble savage, through his day in a cantonment town. He is alternatively angry and submissive, his smouldering rage contained by the fatalism of generations, as he struggles with the dehumanizing burden of being a scavenger of human excrement, the ritually polluting profession of his forefathers. The day's events underline the deep discrimination that defines the caste system. There is the angry street brawl when Bakha accidentally brushes against a high-caste Hindu; the temple priest who accuses him of polluting the temple even as he makes lecherous advances towards the boy's sister; the low-castes waiting on the village well for a high-caste to draw water for them. Bakha yearns for change, for a life beyond the cleaning of latrines and hurling of abuse, even the life of the European sahibs – a life of "strange, low canvas beds covered tightly with blankets, eating eggs, drinking tea and wine in tea mugs, going to parade and then walking down to the bazaar with cigarettes in their mouths and small silver-mounted canes in their hands". He expresses his emancipation through random items of European dress that he picks up from the rag-sellers in the cantonment – a regulation overcoat, breeches, puttees and ammunition boots.
Anand offers Bakha several alternative ways out of the rigid caste hierarchy. There is the option of conversion to Christianity at the hands of Colonel Hutchinson, the local Salvation Army padre who scouts the outcaste colony to win over souls for Jesus with his caste-free sympathy – only a racist outburst from Hutchinson's working-class wife ruins the attempt. Bakha then joins a crowd of "all the different races, colours, castes and creeds" drawn to the magnetic, Messiah-like presence of the Mahatma. The political context is Gandhi's recent fast unto death to oppose separate electorates for the untouchables (or Dalits) which he regarded as another manifestation of British divide-and-rule policy, arguing that he represented all untouchables, or Harijans (people of God) as he called them. The Dalit leader, B. R. Ambedkar, a staunch Gandhi rival and the eventual Chairman of the Drafting Committee of India's Constitution, rejected this attitude of inclusivity without equality; he withdrew his demand for separate electorates only under pressure from Gandhi's fast.
Bakha reacts to Gandhi's remarks unevenly: he is happy to hear that untouchability is a sin and a blot on Hinduism and that Gandhi wishes to be reborn as an outcaste. But he considers it unfair that the Mahatma believes that the untouchables must purify themselves, "rid themselves of evil habits, like drinking liquor and eating carrion", in order to achieve emancipation. The confusion anticipates the difference in approach of Gandhi and Ambedkar. The latter, whom Dalits in India today regard as their true emancipator, did not believe that the consciences of upper-caste Hindus could be aroused through persuasion and preferred a more drastic path. Decrying Gandhi's idealization of the village, he pushed instead for rapid urbanization and industrialization which would enable the untouchables to follow dignified professions. The most appealing solution that Anand offers Bakha at the end of the book is technology, when a modernizing poet points to the limitations of Gandhian thought and argues that the import of the flushing Western toilet may quickly end untouchability.
Untouchable accurately reflects central Dalit concerns of the time: the daily humiliation, demands for education and temple entry, access to public wells, sexual vulnerability of Dalit women. Yet Bakha is too much of an individualist, only incidentally worried about his community's concerns, and Anand is ultimately an upper-caste outsider with an angry edge and sympathetic eye. More authentic Dalit voices have long since eclipsed the novel in their expression of caste discrimination. Thus while Untouchable may not convincingly be a Mahatma novel, neither is it Dalit literature. But neat labels sit uncomfortably on great works of passion and art: Untouchable remains relevant in a country where, as Guha says ,"untouchability has been challenged, but by no means ended" and whose new Prime Minister in his Independence Day speech from the Red Fort in Delhi called for a national drive to build toilets.
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