Untouchable

"A soft smile lingered on his lips, the smile of a slave overjoyed at the condescension of his master, more akin to pride than to happiness."

After Charat Singh offers to give Bakha a hockey stick, Bakha smiles. But there are few signs in the novel that he ever experiences real happiness. The Untouchables are unused to kindness, compliments, or gifts. Bakha smiles because someone higher has deigned to stoop to his level, not because he is being treated as an equal.

"He worked unconsciously. This forgetfulness or emptiness persisted in him over long periods. It was a sort of insensitivity created in him by the kind of work he had to do, a tough skin which must be a shield against all the most awful sensations."

Bakha's work is so menial, dull, and dirty, that he blocks it out in self-defense even as he does it. Because he was born Untouchable, he is not able to aspire to more than the most awful sensations described in the quote. To be an Untouchable is to be forgetful and empty as a matter of survival. Bakha has little control over his life, and so has little control over his feelings.

"He frowned in the gruff manner of a man who was really good and kind at heart, but who knew he was weak and infirm and so bullied his children, to preserve his authority, lest he should be repudiated by them, refused and rejected as the difficult old rubbish he was."

Lakha is rarely shown interacting with his children without insulting them. There are suggestions throughout the novel that his hardness is a result of the helplessness he feels as an Untouchable. Lakha is frustrated that he cannot give his children a better life, but takes his frustration out on his loved ones. He is dependent on his children, but still acts in ways that alienate them.

"For though he considered them his inferiors since he came back with sharpened wits from the British barracks, he still recognized them as his neighbors, the intimates with whose lives, whose thoughts, whose feelings he had to make a compromise."

Despite his misery at being an Untouchable, Bakha considers his friends inferior to him, since he dresses better and they have not spent time in the British barracks. Bakha's attitude is another example of how entrenched the caste system is. Even an Untouchable like himself instinctively finds a way to look down on others. It is more difficult to treat someone as an equal if the other person is viewed as inferior.

“Later still he realized that there was no school which would admit him because the parents of the other children would not allow their songs to be contaminated by the touch of the low-caste man’s sons. How absurd, he thought, that was, since most of the Hindu children touched him willingly at hockey and wouldn’t mind having him at school with them. But the teachers wouldn’t teach the outcastes, lest their fingers which guided the students across the text should touch the leaves of the outcastes’ books and they be polluted.”

As a child, Bakha tells his father that he wants to go to school so that he can become a respected person in the community. His father told him that he would never learn to read and write, because he was not allowed to attend school. Bakha recognizes the hypocrisy and cruelty of the system. Other children are willing to touch him during games, and priests are willing to touch Sohini when their sexual appetites move them to do so. By denying knowledge to the Untouchables, the upper castes ensure that they will not aspire to rise above their stations.

“For a sweeper, a menial, to be seen smoking constituted an offence before the Lord. Bakha knew that it was considered a presumption on the part of the poor to smoke like the rich people.”

Bakha buys a pack of cigarettes but must take care that he not be seen smoking. Even a small pleasure like a cigarette, when in the hands of an Untouchable, is seen by the upper castes as putting on airs. Bakha wants to smoke because he enjoys it, but the simple act of smoking both offends God—according to the caste system—and mocks the rich because one of their inferiors is pretending to be like them.

“Why don’t you call, you swine, and announce your approach! Do you know you have touched me and defiled me, you cock-eyed son of a bow-legged scorpion! Now I will have to go and take a bath to purify myself. And it was a new dhoti and shirt I put on this morning!”

The term “Untouchable” is meant literally in the novel. Bakha accidentally bumps into a Hindu while walking and sightseeing in the city. His touch produces a torrent of venomous insults from the man, who must now take time out of his day to bathe himself so that he can be cleansed. The undercastes are seen as less than human. Reactions like that of the man in the quote illustrate the need for the reform Gandhi proposes in his speech at the end of the novel, but also shows the difficulty the Untouchables have in changing the minds of the upper caste Hindus.

“Careless, irresponsible swine! They don’t want to work! They laze about! They ought to be wiped off the face of the earth!”

The mob yells insults at Bakha. When Bakha begins to feel resentment, and then rage, at the unfairness of his circumstances, part of it is because he knows the crowd is wrong in its accusations. He spends nearly all of his time working and begging, and is still called lazy and unwilling to work. It is impossible for someone to show gratitude to an Untouchable, despite the service they provide. If the Untouchables did not do the work of cleaning and handling refuse, disease would spread and the quality of life would diminish for everyone in the city.

“They always abuse us. Because we are sweepers. Because we touch dung. They hate dung. I hate it too. That’s why I came here. I was tired of working on the latrines every day. That’s why they don’t touch us, the high-castes. The tonga-wallah was kind. He made me weep telling me, in that way, to take my things and walk along. But he is a Muhammadan. They don’t mind touching us, the Muhammadans and the sahibs. It is only the Hindus and the outcastes who are not sweepers. For them I am a sweeper, sweeper—Untouchable! That’s the word! Untouchable! I am an Untouchable!”

A Muslim man prevents the mob from becoming more aggressive with Bakha and helps him put his turban back on. Bakha is touched at the man’s kindness, but infuriated that someone with a different faith can help him, but his own people treat him as if he is garbage. His thoughts after escaping the crowd are angry and despairing. He is realizing that he hates the job he is required to do as much as the Hindus would hate it. He has been born into a system that requires that he be abused, and the epiphany will horrify him increasingly over the remainder of his day in the city.

“As a child, Bakha had often expressed a desire to wear rings on his fingers, and liked to look at his mother adorned with silver ornaments. Now that he had been to the British barracks and known that the English didn’t like jewelry, he was full of disgust for the florid, minutely studded designs of the native ornaments.”

Bakha idolizes the British to the point where he begins to loathe aspects of his own culture. There is no sign that Bakha is aware that his disdain for the traditions of his people uses language similar to that of the upper castes for the Untouchables. He does not merely disapprove of the Indian jewelry, it “disgusts” him. He wants nothing to do with it and cannot tolerate the sight of it, despite the fact that it was an aesthetic that he enjoyed before adopting what he believes to be the superior mindset of the British.

“He felt he could kill them all. He looked ruthless, a deadly pale and livid with anger and rage. A similar incident he had heard about, rose to his mind in a flash. A young rustic had teased a friend’s sister as she was coming home through the fields after collecting fuel. Her brother had gone straight to the field with an axe in his hand and murdered the fellow.”

Bakha watches the crowd at the temple shouting at Sohini. He knows that the priest grabbed her breasts and then claimed that she had defiled him with her touch when she screamed for him to stop. Bakha’s growing resentment has become a rage that threatens to drive him to murder. But it is this desire for violence that Gandhi will speak about at the train station at the novel’s conclusion. Violence and anger will not be able to solve the problems of the Untouchables. Their challenges are vast and require a total political reform.

“‘Aren’t they a superior lot these days!’ exclaimed the lady, disappointed at not receiving a courtesy. ‘They are getting more and more uppish.’”

A woman throws a piece of bread at Bakha from her fourth-story window, after shouting at him for touching her porch. She then orders him to clean up her son’s waste after the boy relieves himself in a drain on the street. When Bakha walks away without cleaning it, and without thanking her for the bread, she is astonished at his ingratitude. The Untouchables are expected to grovel and to thank the Hindus for scraps of sustenance and waste.

“‘You should try and get to know them. You have got to work for them all your life, my son, after I die.’ Bakha felt the keen edge of his sense of anticipation draw before his eyes the horrible prospect of all the future days of service in the town and the insults that would come with them.”

Bakha’s father tries to convince his son that the Hindus are worth knowing, and that they can be very kind. But his statement that Bakha will work for them as long as he lives is terrible to Bakha. There is nothing he can expect for himself beyond constant abuse and demeaning labor. Before he began contemplating his own future, he was resigned to his fate, but not horrified by it. Now that he is growing tired of the abuse, he is becoming desperate for change.

“They are our superiors. One word of there is sufficient to overbalance all that we might say before the police. They are our masters. We must respect them and do as they tell us.”

Bakha’s father encourages him to accept the reality that he is inferior to the rest of the Hindus. The Untouchables can be persecuted, raped, and even killed without help from the corrupt police force. Bakha is unable to treat people with respect who are not willing to show the same respect to him. He no longer wishes to have masters, but there is no way for him to change it, which sends him further into his depression.

“He was feeling quite detached from the human world, swathed in a sort of unadulterated melancholy.”

As Bakha walks through the streets with his friends, the colors and sights that thrilled him earlier in the day are now dull and unremarkable to him. He is feeling disconnected from the world in the same way he saw his mother as being disconnected from his own reality earlier in the novel. He is losing the ability to enjoy things that previously gave him pleasure, now that he sees the bleak future that he will have.

“He felt the most excruciating mental pain he had ever felt in his body. He shivered. His broad, impassive face was pale with hostility. But he couldn’t do anything. He hung his head and walked with a drooping chest. His frame seemed to be burdened with the weight of an inexpressible, unrelieved power.”

After Chota proposes that they take revenge on the Hindu who slapped Bakha, Bakha is briefly enthusiastic. But then he realizes that the satisfaction he would take in revenge would pale in comparison to the punishment he—and possibly his family—would suffer in response. Bakha is willing to take action to improve his life, but he cannot find an obvious action to take. The knowledge that he is stuck is an emotional agony for him.

“There was a comfortable, homely glow radiating from the smile that the Havildar wore. Bakha felt happy in his presence. ‘For this man,’ he said to himself, ‘I wouldn’t mind being a sweeper all my life. I would do anything for him.”

Charat Singh is kind to Bakha, even before he gives him the hockey stick. Bakha realizes that it is not the work he has to do that repulses him—even though the work is dirty. What he finds most objectionable is that he must do dirty work for people who hate him and treat him with contempt. He is also supposed to be grateful for the opportunity to serve people who see him as an inferior.

“The cup of Bakha’s life was filled to overflowing with the happiness of the lucid, shining afternoon, as the bowl of the sky was filled with a clear and warm sunshine. He could have jumped for joy.”

Bakha’s depression is temporarily interrupted after the kind treatment he receives from Charat Singh. His joy is disproportionally intense given the small acts of kindness. His reality has become so grim that the gift of the hockey stick makes him giddy almost to the point of mania. As he walks, he thinks about Charat Singh obsessively, elevating him above all other men in India.

“Why should the boy’s mother abuse him when he had tried to be kind? She hadn’t even let him tell her how it all happened. ‘Of course, I polluted the child. I couldn’t help doing so. I knew my touch would pollute, but it was impossible not to pick him up. He was dazed, the poor little thing, and she abused me.”

During the hockey game, one of the pair of wealthy young boys from earlier in the novel is struck in the head with a rock. He begins to bleed. Bakha is worried and picks him up to carry him to his mother. Rather than being gracious and thanking him for helping her injured child, she curses Bakha. His help is unwelcome if it requires him to touch her son. Bakha reacts with kindness, but is rewarded with cruelty.

“‘You are sad,’ said the Colonel, putting his hand on Bakha’s shoulder.”

Colonel Hutchison is the only character in the novel to validate Bakha’s sadness. He sees Bakha sitting alone in despair. Not only does he notice Bakha’s grief, he tries to help by speaking to him in Hindustani and inviting him to church. Bakha is unused to empathy, but the compassion the white Colonel shows to him shakes him out of his melancholy while they are together. The rest of the upper castes would be incapable or unwilling to even notice the sorrow of an Untouchable.

“He was afraid of the thought of conversion. He hadn’t understood very much of what the Salvationist had said. He didn’t like the idea of being called a sinner. He had committed no sin that he could remember.”

Bakha is confused by Hutchison’s Christian rhetoric. He resents being called a sinner because he knows that he does not commit sins. The Christian idea of original sin is a form of predestination: one is born with sin regardless of whether the person continues to sin. Untouchables are born unclean in the eyes of the upper Hindus, but they cannot cleanse themselves in the same way that a Christian can repent of sins.

“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 ground, 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.”

One of Gandhi’s recommendations for Untouchable liberation is that they stop accepting scraps of food. He tells the people that if they believe they deserve more, then they must act as if they deserve more. Further, they must insist through their actions that they must be treated with courtesy. Gandhi’s ideas are in stark contrast to the anger and desire for revenge shared by Chota and Bakha earlier in the day.

“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 oft 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.”

Bakha overhears the poet speaking to the attorney about equality. The poet believes that the hierarchical differences between people are manmade. If two people are clean and kind, it is not possible to tell which of them is a member of an upper, and which a lower, caste. Kindness and civility do not belong only to the privileged. Peasants understand inequality better than the elite do, according to the poet, because they have a better understanding of inequality.