It was a surprise to read, in late 2004, that Mulk Raj Anand had died. I’d assumed he was dead. I had read his novel Untouchable many years earlier. He was ninety-eight. Nirad C Chaudhuri had died in 1999 aged 101, RK Narayan in 2001 aged ninety-four.

All three wrote in English. I’ve never got on with Narayan, though he’s the best known in the UK and was the living novelist Graham Greene most admired “in the English language”. He wrote novels about the fictional town of Malgudi, in South India, a few hours’ journey away from Madras, where he was born, and he spent nearly all his time in India.

Chaudhuri, a Bengali, born in Kishoreganj in East Bengal, now Bangladesh, wrote the wonderfulAutobiography of an Unknown Indian (1951). He was not a novelist. I am not being patronising when I say wonderful, even though its dedication reads:

TO THE MEMORY OF THE BRITISH EMPIRE IN INDIA,
WHICH CONFERRED SUBJECTHOOD ON US,
BUT WITHHELD CITIZENSHIP;
TO WHICH YET
EVERY ONE OF US THREW OUT THE CHALLENGE:
“CIVIS BRITANNICUS SUM”
BECAUSE
ALL THAT WAS GOOD AND LIVING
WITHIN US
WAS MADE, SHAPED AND QUICKENED
BY THE SAME BRITISH RULE

He left India for the first time in his life in 1955, at the age of fifty-seven, visiting England, Paris and Rome. He settled in England in 1970 and died near Oxford. He published A Passage to England in 1971, and his last book, Three Horsemen of the New Apocalypse, in 1999. But this is turning into a post on Chaudhuri.

Anand was born in Peshawar, studied in Amritsar, and wrote novels and much else. (The three writers I have mentioned were born at the three points of perhaps the largest triangle that can be drawn on the map of India.)

He spent the pre-war and war years in England and wrote Untouchable there. It deals with an Outcast man or Dalit or member of the Scheduled Castes orHarijan (Gandhi’s name for them) who cleans latrines. “They think we are dirt because we clean their dirt.” That is what the lowest castes often do: they deal with what used to be called night-soil. Dalits are also leather-workers, carcass-handlers, poor farmers, landless labourers, street cleaners. They were and are isolated in their own communities. Even their shadows were avoided by the upper castes.

Discrimination against Dalits was forbidden by the Indian Constitution which came into effect in 1950, but of course continues. A Dalit can remain a Dalit even after his or his community’s occupation has changed.

Film from the International Dalit Solidarity Network.

BBC piece from 2002 about night-soil scavenging in Bangalore.

Slides about those who worked for the upliftment of Dalits.

And see this recent post.

There is a special group in Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Sri Lanka called Paraiyar, or Pariahs, a community at the bottom of the caste system that was originally identified with news-bearers or drum-beaters. They are now usually day-labourers.

Japan has its Untouchables: the leather-working community, or rather their descendants, called Eta or Burakumin.

The Indian women who used to clean the lavatories at Heathrow were surely Untouchables.

Untouchable was published in England in 1935. EM Forster wrote a Preface for it. He speculated that its dirty subject-matter would mean that some readers “would not trust themselves to speak”, but

“The book seems to me indescribably clean and I hesitate for words in which this can be conveyed. Avoiding rhetoric and circumlocution, it has gone straight to the heart of its subject and purified it.

[...]

“No god is needed to rescue the Untouchables, no vows of self-sacrifice and abnegation on the part of more fortunate Indians, but simply and solely – the flush system. Introduce water-closets and main-drainage throughout India, and all this wicked rubbish about untouchability will disappear.”

He ends:

“[The protagonist’s] Indian day is over and the next day will be like it, but on the surface of the earth if not in the depths of the sky [repetition of a leitmotifof A Passage to India], a change is at hand.”

But change was not at hand for many, because the flush system did not come quickly to India. Is it doing the trick anyway when it comes? Even today, most Indian dwellings do not have a flushing lavatory. Night soil is still removed manually even from many urban flats, or you go outside to defecate.

December 2003 interview from India Together.

A Penguin ’80s cover; The Mulk Raj Anand Omnibus, New Delhi, Viking, 2004