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Emmatty, Joe George
- Anand’s Genuineness and Indigenous Novelists
Authors
Source
International Journal of Innovative Research and Development, Vol 2, No 13 (2013), Pagination:Abstract
The Hindu caste system is a well planned scheme of discriminating people which persisted in India for about three thousand years and it still continues its hold in Indian Hindu society. Untouchability, the worst byproduct of this system grasps the Indian Hindu society in its clutches even in the modern democratic India. In the milieu of discrimination on the basis of caste, everyone acts as if they do not discriminate Bakha is an untouchable boy who is healthy, well built and energetic. But he is an outcast in the Hindu Indian caste society: an untouchable. Anand’s novel Untouchable acts as an evidence for the cruelty imparted on untouchables by depicting Bakha’s life story. His other novel The Road also brings out the picture of Bikhu, the untouchable and his sufferings in the setting of democratic India. Bakha’s search to find the meaning in his life and Bikhu’s striving for the escape from the malice of the caste order finally ends up with no much result. Both the protagonists were forced to realize and accept their unalterable fate as untouchables. . Mulk Raj Anand in his first novel Untouchable (1935) has shown that none of the western theoretical models of attaining social justice is successful in the Hindu Indian social context. Munno, the ‘hero-anti-hero’ of Coolie (1936), being a ‘Kshathriya’ by birth is not enslaved by caste, can at least choose to fight back. The fact is that both Bakha and Munoo are helpless laborers. Their service for the society was not valued at all. However, Anand was capable of stretching the metaphors of ‘untouchable’ and ‘coolie’ to a universal scenario suggesting that discrimination based on one’s work existed universally.The two metaphors can undoubtedly be considered as collective metaphors of sociology, history and metaphysics of human suffering. Man’s inhumanity to fellow man and discrimination on the basis of work, class and caste is also a universal reality
Keywords
Labour, untouchability, consciousness, justice, caste-ism, novelists, humanism UntouchableFull Text
- Anand’s Realism In Indian Novels
Authors
Source
International Journal of Innovative Research and Development, Vol 2, No 11 (2013), Pagination:Abstract
Untouchability is so deep ischolar_mained in the Indian society that we can still see the effects of it on the fringes of modern India. On the face of it everyone acts as if they do not discriminate, but where do the Hindus go with a century of consciousness and conditioned mind that lived in the society where the caste system is still rampant. Change is coming, not in the offing, but slowly and Mulk Raj Anand was able to bring out the subject of this discrimination which prevailed in the Hindu dominated India.
Bakha is a young man, proud and even attractive, yet none the less he is an outcast in Hindu Indian caste system: an Untouchable. In deceptively simple prose this groundbreaking novel describes a day in the life of Bakha, sweeper and toilet-cleaner, as he searches for a meaning to the tragic existence he has been born into - and comes to an unexpected conclusion.
Mulk Raj Anand in his first novel Untouchable (1935) has shown that none of the western theoretical models of attaining social justice are successful in the Indian context. The Rousseauistic, the Hegelian and the Marxist models, were not appropriate in theorising the tragedy of Bakha’s deterministic existence and the stubborn order of the Hindu caste system that is responsible for the creation of the Bakhas of society. Ironically, the ‘lowest dregs’ of mankind in western literatures can at least rebel, but Bakha as an untouchable by birth, cannot even dream of it. Munno, the ‘hero-anti-hero’ of Coolie (1936), being a ‘Kshatriya’ who is not enslaved by caste, can at least fight back. While Bakha’s complicated existence as an untouchable is based on the ‘varnashram’ structure of Hinduism, Munoo’s fate as a rickshaw-puller is tied to his dehumanising work as a coolie. The fact remains that both Bakha and Munoo are helpless labourers whose work has been permanently devalued and misappropriated. However, Anand was capable of stretching the metaphors of untouchable and coolie to a universal scenario suggesting that the predicament existed universally. In other words, still the major part of humanity comprises either untouchables or coolies. Thus the two metaphors can undoubtedly be considered as collective metaphors of sociology, history and metaphysics of human suffering and man’s inhumanity to fellowKeywords
Labour, untouchabilty, consciousness, justice, casteism, humanism UntouchableFull Text